Connie had a sitting–room on the third floor, the top floor of the central portion of the house. Clifford’s rooms were on the ground floor, of course. Michaelis was flattered by being asked up to Lady Chatterley’s own parlour. He followed blindly after the servant...he never noticed things, or had contact with Isis surroundings. In her room he did glance vaguely round at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and C‚zanne.

‘It’s very pleasant up here,’ he said, with his queer smile, as if it hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. ‘You are wise to get up to the top.’

‘Yes, I think so,’ she said.

Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never seen it, and she asked very few people up.

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.