So she withdrew away from Gudrun and from that which she stood for, she
turned in spirit towards Birkin again. She had not seen him since the
fiasco of his proposal. She did not want to, because she did not want
the question of her acceptance thrust upon her. She knew what Birkin
meant when he asked her to marry him; vaguely, without putting it into
speech, she knew. She knew what kind of love, what kind of surrender he
wanted. And she was not at all sure that this was the kind of love that
she herself wanted. She was not at all sure that it was this mutual
unison in separateness that she wanted. She wanted unspeakable
intimacies. She wanted to have him, utterly, finally to have him as her
own, oh, so unspeakably, in intimacy. To drink him down--ah, like a
life-draught. She made great professions, to herself, of her
willingness to warm his foot-soles between her breasts, after the
fashion of the nauseous Meredith poem. But only on condition that he,
her lover, loved her absolutely, with complete self-abandon. And subtly
enough, she knew he would never abandon himself FINALLY to her. He did
not believe in final self-abandonment. He said it openly. It was his
challenge. She was prepared to fight him for it. For she believed in an
absolute surrender to love. She believed that love far surpassed the
individual. He said the individual was MORE than love, or than any
relationship. For him, the bright, single soul accepted love as one of
its conditions, a condition of its own equilibrium. She believed that
love was EVERYTHING. Man must render himself up to her. He must be
quaffed to the dregs by her. Let him be HER MAN utterly, and she in
return would be his humble slave--whether she wanted it or not.