‘Yes! Because who I really love, and it’ll make you hate me, is Mr Mellors, who was our game–keeper here.’

If he could have sprung out of his chair, he would have done so. His face went yellow, and his eyes bulged with disaster as he glared at her.

Then he dropped back in the chair, gasping and looking up at the ceiling.

At length he sat up.

‘Do you mean to say you re telling me the truth?’ he asked, looking gruesome.

‘Yes! You know I am.’

‘And when did you begin with him?’

‘In the spring.’

He was silent like some beast in a trap.

‘And it WAS you, then, in the bedroom at the cottage?’

So he had really inwardly known all the time.

‘Yes!’

He still leaned forward in his chair, gazing at her like a cornered beast.

‘My God, you ought to be wiped off the face of the earth!’

‘Why?’ she ejaculated faintly.

But he seemed not to hear.

‘That scum! That bumptious lout! That miserable cad! And carrying on with him all the time, while you were here and he was one of my servants! My God, my God, is there any end to the beastly lowness of women!’

He was beside himself with rage, as she knew he would be.

‘And you mean to say you want to have a child to a cad like that?’

‘Yes! I’m going to.’

‘You’re going to! You mean you’re sure! How long have you been sure?’

‘Since June.’

He was speechless, and the queer blank look of a child came over him again.

‘You’d wonder,’ he said at last, ‘that such beings were ever allowed to be born.’

‘What beings?’ she asked.

He looked at her weirdly, without an answer. It was obvious, he couldn’t even accept the fact of the existence of Mellors, in any connexion with his own life. It was sheer, unspeakable, impotent hate.

‘And do you mean to say you’d marry him?—and bear his foul name?’ he asked at length.

‘Yes, that’s what I want.’

He was again as if dumbfounded.

‘Yes!’ he said at last. ‘That proves that what I’ve always thought about you is correct: you’re not normal, you’re not in your right senses. You’re one of those half–insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the NOSTALGIE DE LA BOUE.’

Suddenly he had become almost wistfully moral, seeing himself the incarnation of good, and people like Mellors and Connie the incarnation of mud, of evil. He seemed to be growing vague, inside a nimbus.

‘So don’t you think you’d better divorce me and have done with it?’ she said.

‘No! You can go where you like, but I shan’t divorce you,’ he said idiotically.

‘Why not?’

He was silent, in the silence of imbecile obstinacy.

‘Would you even let the child be legally yours, and your heir?’ she said.

‘I care nothing about the child.’