When he came back, Connie said:

‘I want to go out too, for a minute.’

She went alone into the darkness. There were stars overhead. She could smell flowers on the night air. And she could feel her wet shoes getting wetter again. But she felt like going away, right away from him and everybody.

It was chilly. She shuddered, and returned to the house. He was sitting in front of the low fire.

‘Ugh! Cold!’ she shuddered.

He put the sticks on the fire, and fetched more, till they had a good crackling chimneyful of blaze. The rippling running yellow flame made them both happy, warmed their faces and their souls.

‘Never mind!’ she said, taking his hand as he sat silent and remote. ‘One does one’s best.’

‘Ay!’ He sighed, with a twist of a smile.

She slipped over to him, and into his arms, as he sat there before the fire.

‘Forget then!’ she whispered. ‘Forget!’

He held her close, in the running warmth of the fire. The flame itself was like a forgetting. And her soft, warm, ripe weight! Slowly his blood turned, and began to ebb back into strength and reckless vigour again.

‘And perhaps the women REALLY wanted to be there and love you properly, only perhaps they couldn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t all their fault,’ she said.

‘I know it. Do you think I don’t know what a broken–backed snake that’s been trodden on I was myself!’

She clung to him suddenly. She had not wanted to start all this again. Yet some perversity had made her.

‘But you’re not now,’ she said. ‘You’re not that now: a broken–backed snake that’s been trodden on.’

‘I don’t know what I am. There’s black days ahead.’

‘No!’ she protested, clinging to him. ‘Why? Why?’

‘There’s black days coming for us all and for everybody,’ he repeated with a prophetic gloom.

‘No! You’re not to say it!’

He was silent. But she could feel the black void of despair inside him. That was the death of all desire, the death of all love: this despair that was like the dark cave inside the men, in which their spirit was lost.

‘And you talk so coldly about sex,’ she said. ‘You talk as if you had only wanted your own pleasure and satisfaction.’

She was protesting nervously against him.

‘Nay!’ he said. ‘I wanted to have my pleasure and satisfaction of a woman, and I never got it: because I could never get my pleasure and satisfaction of HER unless she got hers of me at the same time. And it never happened. It takes two.’

‘But you never believed in your women. You don’t even believe really in me,’ she said.

‘I don’t know what believing in a woman means.’

‘That’s it, you see!’

She still was curled on his lap. But his spirit was grey and absent, he was not there for her. And everything she said drove him further.