hundred pounds last year! was the retort simple and final.
If you were young, you just set your teeth, and bit on and held on,
till the money began to flow from the invisible; it was a question of power.
It was a question of will; a subtle, subtle, powerful emanation of will out
of yourself brought back to you the mysterious nothingness of money a word
on a bit of paper. It was a sort of magic, certainly it was triumph. The
bitch-goddess! Well, if one had to prostitute oneself, let it be to a
bitch-goddess! One could always despise her even while one prostituted
oneself to her, which was good.
Clifford, of course, had still many childish taboos and fetishes. He
wanted to be thought `really good', which was all cock-a-hoopy nonsense.
What was really good was what actually caught on. It was no good being
really good and getting left with it. It seemed as if most of the `really
good' men just missed the bus. After all you only lived one life, and if you
missed the bus, you were just left on the pavement, along with the rest of
the failures.
Connie was contemplating a winter in London with Clifford, next winter.
He and she had caught the bus all right, so they might as well ride on top
for a bit, and show it.
The worst of it was, Clifford tended to become vague, absent, and to
fall into fits of vacant depression. It was the wound to his psyche coming
out. But it made Connie want to scream. Oh God, if the mechanism of the
consciousness itself was going to go wrong, then what was one to do? Hang it
all, one did one's bit! Was one to be let down absolutely?
Sometimes she wept bitterly, but even as she wept she was saying to
herself: Silly fool, wetting hankies! As if that would get you anywhere!
Since Michaelis, she had made up her mind she wanted nothing. That
seemed the simplest solution of the otherwise insoluble. She wanted nothing
more than what she'd got; only she wanted to get ahead with what she'd got:
Clifford, the stories, Wragby, the Lady-Chatterley business, money and fame,
such as it was...she wanted to go ahead with it all. Love, sex, all that
sort of stuff, just water-ices! Lick it up and forget it. If you don't hang
on to it in your mind, it's nothing. Sex especially...nothing! Make up your
mind to it, and you've solved the problem. Sex and a cocktail: they both
lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same
thing.
But a child, a baby! That was still one of the sensations. She would
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