‘You don’t expect me to take you seriously, do you?’ asked Gerald.

‘Yes, Gerald, you’re one of the very few people I do expect that of.’

‘Then I’m afraid I can’t come up to your expectations here, at any rate. You think people should just do as they like.’

‘I think they always do. But I should like them to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. And they only like to do the collective thing.’

‘And I,’ said Gerald grimly, ‘shouldn’t like to be in a world of people who acted individually and spontaneously, as you call it. We should have everybody cutting everybody else’s throat in five minutes.’

‘That means YOU would like to be cutting everybody’s throat,’ said Birkin.

‘How does that follow?’ asked Gerald crossly.

‘No man,’ said Birkin, ‘cuts another man’s throat unless he wants to cut it, and unless the other man wants it cutting. This is a complete truth. It takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee. And a murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is murderable is a man who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered.’

‘Sometimes you talk pure nonsense,’ said Gerald to Birkin. ‘As a matter of fact, none of us wants our throat cut, and most other people would like to cut it for us—some time or other—’

‘It’s a nasty view of things, Gerald,’ said Birkin, ‘and no wonder you are afraid of yourself and your own unhappiness.’

‘How am I afraid of myself?’ said Gerald; ‘and I don’t think I am unhappy.’

‘You seem to have a lurking desire to have your gizzard slit, and imagine every man has his knife up his sleeve for you,’ Birkin said.

‘How do you make that out?’ said Gerald.

‘From you,’ said Birkin.

There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very near to love. It was always the same between them; always their talk brought them into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous intimacy which was either hate or love, or both. They parted with apparent unconcern, as if their going apart were a trivial occurrence. And they really kept it to the level of trivial occurrence. Yet the heart of each burned from the other. They burned with each other, inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their relationship a casual free–and–easy friendship, they were not going to be so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart–burning between them. They had not the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful but suppressed friendliness.

A school–day was drawing to a close. In the class–room the last lesson was in progress, peaceful and still. It was elementary botany. The desks were littered with catkins, hazel and willow, which the children had been sketching. But the sky had come overdark, as the end of the afternoon approached: there was scarcely light to draw any more. Ursula stood in front of the class, leading the children by questions to understand the structure and the meaning of the catkins.