'But,' she said, 'you believe in individual love, even if you don't
believe in loving humanity--?' 'I don't believe in love at all--that is, any more than I believe in
hate, or in grief. Love is one of the emotions like all the others--and
so it is all right whilst you feel it But I can't see how it becomes an
absolute. It is just part of human relationships, no more. And it is
only part of ANY human relationship. And why one should be required
ALWAYS to feel it, any more than one always feels sorrow or distant
joy, I cannot conceive. Love isn't a desideratum--it is an emotion you
feel or you don't feel, according to circumstance.' 'Then why do you care about people at all?' she asked, 'if you don't
believe in love? Why do you bother about humanity?' 'Why do I? Because I can't get away from it.' 'Because you love it,' she persisted.
It irritated him.
'If I do love it,' he said, 'it is my disease.' 'But it is a disease you don't want to be cured of,' she said, with
some cold sneering.
He was silent now, feeling she wanted to insult him.
'And if you don't believe in love, what DO you believe in?' she asked
mocking. 'Simply in the end of the world, and grass?' He was beginning to feel a fool.
'I believe in the unseen hosts,' he said.
'And nothing else? You believe in nothing visible, except grass and
birds? Your world is a poor show.' 'Perhaps it is,' he said, cool and superior now he was offended,
assuming a certain insufferable aloof superiority, and withdrawing into
his distance.
Ursula disliked him. But also she felt she had lost something. She
looked at him as he sat crouched on the bank. There was a certain
priggish Sunday-school stiffness over him, priggish and detestable. And
yet, at the same time, the moulding of him was so quick and attractive,
it gave such a great sense of freedom: the moulding of his brows, his
chin, his whole physique, something so alive, somewhere, in spite of
the look of sickness.
And it was this duality in feeling which he created in her, that made a
fine hate of him quicken in her bowels. There was his wonderful,
desirable life-rapidity, the rare quality of an utterly desirable man:
and there was at the same time this ridiculous, mean effacement into a
Salvator Mundi and a Sunday-school teacher, a prig of the stiffest
type.
He looked up at her. He saw her face strangely enkindled, as if
suffused from within by a powerful sweet fire. His soul was arrested in
wonder. She was enkindled in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder
and in pure, perfect attraction, he moved towards her. She sat like a
strange queen, almost supernatural in her glowing smiling richness.