the physical experience. It is curious what a subtle but unmistakable
transmutation it makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman more
blooming, more subtly rounded, her young angularities softened, and her
expression either anxious or triumphant: the man much quieter, more inward,
the very shapes of his shoulders and his buttocks less assertive, more
hesitant.
In the actual sex-thrill within the body, the sisters nearly succumbed
to the strange male power. But quickly they recovered themselves, took the
sex-thrill as a sensation, and remained free. Whereas the men, in gratitude
to the woman for the sex experience, let their souls go out to her. And
afterwards looked rather as if they had lost a shilling and found sixpence.
Connie's man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda's a bit jeering. But that is
how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they
hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again,
for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are
discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman
do what she may.
However, came the war, Hilda and Connie were rushed home again after
having been home already in May, to their mother's funeral. Before Christmas
of 1914 both their German young men were dead: whereupon the sisters wept,
and loved the young men passionately, but underneath forgot them. They
didn't exist any more.
Both sisters lived in their father's, really their mother's, Kensington
housemixed with the young Cambridge group, the group that stood for
`freedom' and flannel trousers, and flannel shirts open at the neck, and a
well-bred sort of emotional anarchy, and a whispering, murmuring sort of
voice, and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner. Hilda, however, suddenly
married a man ten years older than herself, an elder member of the same
Cambridge group, a man with a fair amount of money, and a comfortable family
job in the government: he also wrote philosophical essays. She lived with
him in a smallish house in Westminster, and moved in that good sort of
society of people in the government who are not tip-toppers, but who are, or
would be, the real intelligent power in the nation: people who know what
they're talking about, or talk as if they did.
Connie did a mild form of war-work, and consorted with the
flannel-trousers Cambridge intransigents, who gently mocked at everything,
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