‘And your nasty, sterile want of common sympathy is in the worst taste imaginable. NOBLESSE OBLIGE! You and your ruling class!’

‘And to what should it oblige me? To have a lot of unnecessary emotions about my game–keeper? I refuse. I leave it all to my evangelist.’

‘As if he weren’t a man as much as you are, my word!’

‘My game–keeper to boot, and I pay him two pounds a week and give him a house.’

‘Pay him! What do you think you pay for, with two pounds a week and a house?’

‘His services.’

‘Bah! I would tell you to keep your two pounds a week and your house.’

‘Probably he would like to: but can’t afford the luxury!’

‘You, and RULE!’ she said. ‘You don’t rule, don’t flatter yourself. You have only got more than your share of the money, and make people work for you for two pounds a week, or threaten them with starvation. Rule! What do you give forth of rule? Why, you re dried up! You only bully with your money, like any Jew or any Schieber!’

‘You are very elegant in your speech, Lady Chatterley!’

‘I assure you, you were very elegant altogether out there in the wood. I was utterly ashamed of you. Why, my father is ten times the human being you are: you GENTLEMAN!’

He reached and rang the bell for Mrs Bolton. But he was yellow at the gills.

She went up to her room, furious, saying to herself: ‘Him and buying people! Well, he doesn’t buy me, and therefore there’s no need for me to stay with him. Dead fish of a gentleman, with his celluloid soul! And how they take one in, with their manners and their mock wistfulness and gentleness. They’ve got about as much feeling as celluloid has.’

She made her plans for the night, and determined to get Clifford off her mind. She didn’t want to hate him. She didn’t want to be mixed up very intimately with him in any sort of feeling. She wanted him not to know anything at all about herself: and especially, not to know anything about her feeling for the keeper. This squabble of her attitude to the servants was an old one. He found her too familiar, she found him stupidly insentient, tough and indiarubbery where other people were concerned.

She went downstairs calmly, with her old demure bearing, at dinner–time. He was still yellow at the gills: in for one of his liver bouts, when he was really very queer.—He was reading a French book.

‘Have you ever read Proust?’ he asked her.

‘I’ve tried, but he bores me.’

‘He’s really very extraordinary.’

‘Possibly! But he bores me: all that sophistication! He doesn’t have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings. I’m tired of self–important mentalities.’

‘Would you prefer self–important animalities?’

‘Perhaps! But one might possibly get something that wasn’t self–important.’