‘But,’ she said, ‘you believe in individual love, even if you don’t believe in loving humanity—?’

‘I don’t believe in love at all—that is, any more than I believe in hate, or in grief. Love is one of the emotions like all the others—and so it is all right whilst you feel it But I can’t see how it becomes an absolute. It is just part of human relationships, no more. And it is only part of ANY human relationship. And why one should be required ALWAYS to feel it, any more than one always feels sorrow or distant joy, I cannot conceive. Love isn’t a desideratum—it is an emotion you feel or you don’t feel, according to circumstance.’

‘Then why do you care about people at all?’ she asked, ‘if you don’t believe in love? Why do you bother about humanity?’

‘Why do I? Because I can’t get away from it.’

‘Because you love it,’ she persisted.

It irritated him.

‘If I do love it,’ he said, ‘it is my disease.’

‘But it is a disease you don’t want to be cured of,’ she said, with some cold sneering.

He was silent now, feeling she wanted to insult him.

‘And if you don’t believe in love, what DO you believe in?’ she asked mocking. ‘Simply in the end of the world, and grass?’

He was beginning to feel a fool.

‘I believe in the unseen hosts,’ he said.

‘And nothing else? You believe in nothing visible, except grass and birds? Your world is a poor show.’

‘Perhaps it is,’ he said, cool and superior now he was offended, assuming a certain insufferable aloof superiority, and withdrawing into his distance.

Ursula disliked him. But also she felt she had lost something. She looked at him as he sat crouched on the bank. There was a certain priggish Sunday–school stiffness over him, priggish and detestable. And yet, at the same time, the moulding of him was so quick and attractive, it gave such a great sense of freedom: the moulding of his brows, his chin, his whole physique, something so alive, somewhere, in spite of the look of sickness.

And it was this duality in feeling which he created in her, that made a fine hate of him quicken in her bowels. There was his wonderful, desirable life–rapidity, the rare quality of an utterly desirable man: and there was at the same time this ridiculous, mean effacement into a Salvator Mundi and a Sunday–school teacher, a prig of the stiffest type.

He looked up at her. He saw her face strangely enkindled, as if suffused from within by a powerful sweet fire. His soul was arrested in wonder. She was enkindled in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder and in pure, perfect attraction, he moved towards her. She sat like a strange queen, almost supernatural in her glowing smiling richness.

‘The point about love,’ he said, his consciousness quickly adjusting itself, ‘is that we hate the word because we have vulgarised it. It ought to be prescribed, tabooed from utterance, for many years, till we get a new, better idea.’