lobsters of the modern, industrial and financial world, invertebrates of the
crustacean order, with shells of steel, like machines, and inner bodies of
soft pulp, Connie herself was really completely stranded.
She was not even free, for Clifford must have her there. He seemed to
have a nervous terror that she should leave him. The curious pulpy part of
him, the emotional and humanly-individual part, depended on her with terror,
like a child, almost like an idiot. She must be there, there at Wragby, a
Lady Chatterley, his wife. Otherwise he would be lost like an idiot on a
moor.
This amazing dependence Connie realized with a sort of horror. She
heard him with his pit managers, with the members of his Board, with young
scientists, and she was amazed at his shrewd insight into things, his power,
his uncanny material power over what is called practical men. He had become
a practical man himself and an amazingly astute and powerful one, a master.
Connie attributed it to Mrs Bolton's influence upon him, just at the crisis
in his life.
But this astute and practical man was almost an idiot when left alone
to his own emotional life. He worshipped Connie. She was his wife, a higher
being, and he worshipped her with a queer, craven idolatry, like a savage, a
worship based on enormous fear, and even hate of the power of the idol, the
dread idol. All he wanted was for Connie to swear, to swear not to leave
him, not to give him away.
`Clifford,' she said to him---but this was after she had the key to the
hut---`Would you really like me to have a child one day?'
He looked at her with a furtive apprehension in his rather prominent
pale eyes.
`I shouldn't mind, if it made no difference between us,' he said.
`No difference to what?' she asked.
`To you and me; to our love for one another. If it's going to affect
that, then I'm all against it. Why, I might even one day have a child of my
own!'
She looked at him in amazement.
`I mean, it might come back to me one of these days.'
She still stared in amazement, and he was uncomfortable.
`So you would not like it if I had a child?' she said.
`I tell you,' he replied quickly, like a cornered dog, `I am quite
willing, provided it doesn't touch your love for me. If it would touch that,
I am dead against it.'
Connie could only be silent in cold fear and contempt. Such talk was
really the gabbling of an idiot. He no longer knew what he was talking
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