Now she and Michaelis sit on opposite sides of the fire and talked. She asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers… other people were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked frankly about himself, quite frankly, without affectation, simply revealing his bitter, indifferent, stray-dog’s soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful pride in his success.

“But why are you such a lonely bird?” Connie asked him; and again he looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look.

“Some birds are that way,” he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar irony: “but, look here, what about yourself? Aren’t you by way of being a lonely bird yourself?” Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few moments, and then she said: “Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!”

“Am I altogether a lonely bird?” he asked, with his queer grin of a smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned or afraid.

“Why?” she said, a little breathless, as she looked at him. “You are, aren’t you?”

She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost lose her balance.

“Oh, you’re quite right!” he said, turning his head away, and looking sideways, downwards, with that strange immobility of an old race that is hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie lose her power to see him detached from herself.

He looked up at her with the full glance that saw everything, registered everything. At the same time, the infant crying in the night was crying out of his breast to her, in a way that affected her very womb.

“It’s awfully nice of you to think of me,” he said laconically.

“Why shouldn’t I think of you?” she exclaimed, with hardly breath to utter it.

He gave the wry, quick hiss of a laugh.

“Oh, in that way!.. May I hold your hand for a minute?” he asked suddenly, fixing his eyes on her with almost hypnotic power, and sending out an appeal that affected her direct in the womb.

She stared at him, dazed and transfixed, and he went over and kneeled beside her, and took her two feet close in his two hands, and buried his face in her lap, remaining motionless. She was perfectly dim and dazed, looking down in a sort of amazement at the rather tender nape of his neck, feeling his face pressing her thighs. In all her burning dismay, she could not help putting her hand, with tenderness and compassion, on the defenceless nape of his neck, and he trembled, with a deep shudder.

Then he looked up at her with that awful appeal in his full, glowing eyes. She was utterly incapable of resisting it. From her breast flowed the answering, immense yearning over him; she must give him anything, anything.

He was a curious and very gentle lover, very gentle with the woman, trembling uncontrollably, and yet at the same time detached, aware, aware of every sound outside.

To her it meant nothing except that she gave herself to him. And at length he ceased to quiver any more, and lay quite still, quite still. Then, with dim, compassionate fingers, she stroked his head, that lay on her breast.

When he rose, he kissed both her hands, then both her feet, in their suede slippers, and in silence went away to the end of the room, where he stood with his back to her. There was silence for some minutes. Then he turned and came to her again as she sat in her old place by the fire.

“And now, I suppose you’ll hate me!” he said in a quiet, inevitable way. She looked up at him quickly.

“Why should I?” she asked.

“They mostly do,” he said; then he caught himself up. “I mean… a woman is supposed to.”

“This is the last moment when I ought to hate you,” she said resentfully.

“I know! I know! It should be so! You’re frightfully good to me…” he cried miserably.

She wondered why he should be miserable. “Won’t you sit down again?” she said. He glanced at the door.

“Sir Clifford!” he said, “won’t he… won’t he be…?” She paused a moment to consider. “Perhaps!” she said. And she looked up at him. “I don’t want Clifford to know not even to suspect. It would hurt him so much. But I don’t think it’s wrong, do you?”

“Wrong! Good God, no! You’re only too infinitely good to me… I can hardly bear it.”

He turned aside, and she saw that in another moment he would be sobbing.

“But we needn’t let Clifford know, need we?” she pleaded. “It would hurt him so. And if he never knows, never suspects, it hurts nobody.”

“Me!” he said, almost fiercely; “he’ll know nothing from me! You see if he does. Me give myself away! Ha! Ha!” he laughed hollowly, cynically, at such an idea. She watched him in wonder. He said to her: “May I kiss your hand and go? I’ll run into Sheffield I think, and lunch there, if I may, and be back to tea. May I do anything for you? May I be sure you don’t hate me? – and that you won’t?’ – he ended with a desperate note of cynicism.

“No, I don’t hate you,” she said. “I think you’re nice.”

“Ah!” he said to her fiercely, “I’d rather you said that to me than said you love me! It means such a lot more… Till afternoon then. I’ve plenty to think about till then.” He kissed her hands humbly and was gone.

“I don’t think I can stand that young man,” said Clifford at lunch.

“Why?” asked Connie.

“He’s such a bounder underneath his veneer… just waiting to bounce us.”

“I think people have been so unkind to him,” said Connie.

“Do you wonder? And do you think he employs his shining hours doing deeds of kindness?”

“I think he has a certain sort of generosity.”

“Towards whom?”

“I don’t quite know.”

“Naturally you don’t. I’m afraid you mistake unscrupulousness for generosity.”

Connie paused. Did she? It was just possible. Yet the unscrupulousness of Michaelis had a certain fascination for her. He went whole lengths where Clifford only crept a few timid paces. In his way he had conquered the world, which was what Clifford wanted to do. Ways and means…? Were those of Michaelis more despicable than those of Clifford? Was the way the poor outsider had shoved and bounced himself forward in person, and by the back doors, any worse than Clifford’s way of advertising himself into prominence? The bitch-goddess, Success, was trailed by thousands of gasping dogs with lolling tongues. The one that got her first was the real dog among dogs, if you go by success! So Michaelis could keep his tail up.

The queer thing was, he didn’t. He came back towards tea-time with a large handful of violets and lilies, and the same hang-dog expression. Connie wondered sometimes if it were a sort of mask to disarm opposition, because it was almost too fixed. Was he really such a sad dog?

His sad-dog sort of extinguished self persisted all the evening, though through it Clifford felt the inner effrontery. Connie didn’t feel it, perhaps because it was not directed against women; only against men, and their presumptions and assumptions. That indestructible, inward effrontery in the meagre fellow was what made men so down on Michaelis. His very presence was an affront to a man of society, cloak it as he might in an assumed good manner.

Connie was in love with him, but she managed to sit with her embroidery and let the men talk, and not give herself away. As for Michaelis, he was perfect; exactly the same melancholic, attentive, aloof young fellow of the previous evening, millions of degrees remote from his hosts, but laconically playing up to them to the required amount, and never coming forth to them for a moment. Connie felt he must have forgotten the morning. He had not forgotten. But he knew where he was… in the same old place outside, where the born outsiders are. He didn’t take the love-making altogether personally. He knew it would not change him from an ownerless dog, whom everybody begrudges its golden collar, into a comfortable society dog.

The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him; just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was also a necessity.

But occasional love, as a comfort and soothing, was also a good thing, and he was not ungrateful. On the contrary, he was burningly, poignantly grateful for a piece of natural, spontaneous kindness: almost to tears. Beneath his pale, immobile, disillusioned face, his child’s soul was sobbing with gratitude to the woman, and burning to come to her again; just as his outcast soul was knowing he would keep really clear of her.

He found an opportunity to say to her, as they were lighting the candles in the hall:

“May I come?”

“I’ll come to you,” she said.

“Oh, good!”

He waited for her a long time… but she came.

He was the trembling excited sort of lover, whose crisis soon came, and was finished. There was something curiously childlike and defenceless about his naked body: as children are naked. His defences were all in his wits and cunning, his very instincts of cunning, and when these were in abeyance he seemed doubly naked and like a child, of unfinished, tender flesh, and somehow struggling helplessly.

He roused in the woman a wild sort of compassion and yearning, and a wild, craving physical desire. The physical desire he did not satisfy in her; he was always come and finished so quickly, then shrinking down on her breast, and recovering somewhat his effrontery while she lay dazed, disappointed, lost.

But then she soon learnt to hold him, to keep him there inside her when his crisis was over. And there he was generous and curiously potent; he stayed firm inside her, giving to her, while she was active… wildly, passionately active, coming to her own crisis. And as he felt the frenzy of her achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction from his hard, erect passivity, he had a curious sense of pride and satisfaction.

“Ah, how good!” she whispered tremulously, and she became quite still, clinging to him. And he lay there in his own isolation, but somehow proud.

He stayed that time only the three days, and to Clifford was exactly the same as on the first evening; to Connie also. There was no breaking down his external man.

He wrote to Connie with the same plaintive melancholy note as ever, sometimes witty, and touched with a queer, sexless affection. A kind of hopeless affection he seemed to feel for her, and the essential remoteness remained the same. He was hopeless at the very core of him, and he wanted to be hopeless. He rather hated hope. “Une immense esprance a travers la terre’,^[32] he read somewhere, and his comment was:’ – and it’s darned-well drowned everything worth having.”

Connie never really understood him, but, in her way, she loved him. And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn’t quite, quite love in hopelessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn’t ever quite love at all.

So they went on for quite a time, writing, and meeting occasionally in London. She still wanted the physical, sexual thrill she could get with him by her own activity, his little orgasm being over. And he still wanted to give it her. Which was enough to keep them connected.

And enough to give her a subtle sort of self-assurance, something blind and a little arrogant. It was an almost mechanical confidence in her own powers, and went with a great cheerfulness.

She was terrifically cheerful at Wragby. And she used all her aroused cheerfulness and satisfaction to stimulate Clifford, so that he wrote his best at this time, and was almost happy in his strange blind way. He really reaped the fruits of the sensual satisfaction she got out of Michaelis’ male passivity erect inside her. But of course he never knew it, and if he had, he wouldn’t have said thank you!

Yet when those days of her grand joyful cheerfulness and stimulus were gone, quite gone, and she was depressed and irritable, how Clifford longed for them again! Perhaps if he’d known he might even have wished to get her and Michaelis together again.