She was quite determined now that there should be no parting between him and her. But the ways and means were still to settle.

‘Did you hate Bertha Coutts?’ she asked him.

‘Don’t talk to me about her.’

‘Yes! You must let me. Because once you liked her. And once you were as intimate with her as you are with me. So you have to tell me. Isn’t it rather terrible, when you’ve been intimate with her, to hate her so? Why is it?’

‘I don’t know. She sort of kept her will ready against me, always, always: her ghastly female will: her freedom! A woman’s ghastly freedom that ends in the most beastly bullying! Oh, she always kept her freedom against me, like vitriol in my face.’

‘But she’s not free of you even now. Does she still love you?’

‘No, no! If she’s not free of me, it’s because she’s got that mad rage, she must try to bully me.’

‘But she must have loved you.’

‘No! Well, in specks she did. She was drawn to me. And I think even that she hated. She loved me in moments. But she always took it back, and started bullying. Her deepest desire was to bully me, and there was no altering her. Her will was wrong, from the first.’

‘But perhaps she felt you didn’t really love her, and she wanted to make you.’

‘My God, it was bloody making.’

‘But you didn’t really love her, did you? You did her that wrong.’

‘How could I? I began to. I began to love her. But somehow, she always ripped me up. No, don’t let’s talk of it. It was a doom, that was. And she was a doomed woman. This last time, I’d have shot her like I shoot a stoat, if I’d but been allowed: a raving, doomed thing in the shape of a woman! If only I could have shot her, and ended the whole misery! It ought to be allowed. When a woman gets absolutely possessed by her own will, her own will set against everything, then it’s fearful, and she should be shot at last.’

‘And shouldn’t men be shot at last, if they get possessed by their own will?’

‘Ay!—the same! But I must get free of her, or she’ll be at me again. I wanted to tell you. I must get a divorce if I possibly can. So we must be careful. We mustn’t really be seen together, you and I. I never, NEVER could stand it if she came down on me and you.’

Connie pondered this.

‘Then we can’t be together?’ she said.

‘Not for six months or so. But I think my divorce will go through in September; then till March.’

‘But the baby will probably be born at the end of February,’ she said.

He was silent.

‘I could wish the Cliffords and Berthas all dead,’ he said.

‘It’s not being very tender to them,’ she said.

‘Tender to them? Yea, even then the tenderest thing you could do for them, perhaps, would be to give them death. They can’t live! They only frustrate life. Their souls are awful inside them. Death ought to be sweet to them. And I ought to be allowed to shoot them.’