But he drew away at last, and kissed her and covered her over, and began to cover himself She lay looking up to the boughs of the tree, unable as yet to move. He stood and fastened up his breeches, looking round. All was dense and silent, save for the awed dog that lay with its paws against its nose. He sat down again on the brushwood and took Connie’s hand in silence.

She turned and looked at him. ‘We came off together that time,’ he said.

She did not answer.

‘It’s good when it’s like that. Most folks live their lives through and they never know it,’ he said, speaking rather dreamily.

She looked into his brooding face.

‘Do they?’ she said. ‘Are you glad?’

He looked back into her eyes. ‘Glad,’ he said, ‘Ay, but never mind.’ He did not want her to talk. And he bent over her and kissed her, and she felt, so he must kiss her for ever.

At last she sat up.

‘Don’t people often come off together?’ she asked with naive curiosity.

‘A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them.’ He spoke unwittingly, regretting he had begun.

‘Have you come off like that with other women?’

He looked at her amused.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I don’t know.’

And she knew he would never tell her anything he didn’t want to tell her. She watched his face, and the passion for him moved in her bowels. She resisted it as far as she could, for it was the loss of herself to herself.

He put on his waistcoat and his coat, and pushed a way through to the path again.

The last level rays of the sun touched the wood. ‘I won’t come with you,’ he said; ‘better not.’

She looked at him wistfully before she turned. His dog was waiting so anxiously for him to go, and he seemed to have nothing whatever to say. Nothing left.

Connie went slowly home, realizing the depth of the other thing in her. Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft in her womb and bowels, and with this self she adored him. She adored him till her knees were weak as she walked. In her womb and bowels she was flowing and alive now and vulnerable, and helpless in adoration of him as the most naive woman. It feels like a child, she said to herself it feels like a child in me. And so it did, as if her womb, that had always been shut, had opened and filled with new life, almost a burden, yet lovely.

‘If I had a child!’ she thought to herself; ‘if I had him inside me as a child!’—and her limbs turned molten at the thought, and she realized the immense difference between having a child to oneself and having a child to a man whom one’s bowels yearned towards. The former seemed in a sense ordinary: but to have a child to a man whom one adored in one’s bowels and one’s womb, it made her feel she was very different from her old self and as if she was sinking deep, deep to the centre of all womanhood and the sleep of creation.