An ironical smile flickered on Gudrun's face.
'Doesn't he feel important?' smiled Gudrun.
'Doesn't he!' exclaimed Ursula, with a little ironical grimace. 'Isn't he a little Lloyd George of the air!'
'Isn't he!
Little Lloyd George of the air!
That's just what they are,' cried Gudrun in delight.
Then for days, Ursula saw the persistent, obtrusive birds as stout, short politicians lifting up their voices from the platform, little men who must make themselves heard at any cost.
But even from this there came the revulsion.
Some yellowhammers suddenly shot along the road in front of her.
And they looked to her so uncanny and inhuman, like flaring yellow barbs shooting through the air on some weird, living errand, that she said to herself:
'After all, it is impudence to call them little Lloyd Georges.
They are really unknown to us, they are the unknown forces.
It is impudence to look at them as if they were the same as human beings.
They are of another world.
How stupid anthropomorphism is!
Gudrun is really impudent, insolent, making herself the measure of everything, making everything come down to human standards.
Rupert is quite right, human beings are boring, painting the universe with their own image.
The universe is non-human, thank God.'
It seemed to her irreverence, destructive of all true life, to make little Lloyd Georges of the birds.
It was such a lie towards the robins, and such a defamation.
Yet she had done it herself.
But under Gudrun's influence: so she exonerated herself.
So she withdrew away from Gudrun and from that which she stood for, she turned in spirit towards Birkin again.
She had not seen him since the fiasco of his proposal.
She did not want to, because she did not want the question of her acceptance thrust upon her.
She knew what Birkin meant when he asked her to marry him; vaguely, without putting it into speech, she knew.
She knew what kind of love, what kind of surrender he wanted.
And she was not at all sure that this was the kind of love that she herself wanted.
She was not at all sure that it was this mutual unison in separateness that she wanted.
She wanted unspeakable intimacies.
She wanted to have him, utterly, finally to have him as her own, oh, so unspeakably, in intimacy.
To drink him down—ah, like a life-draught.
She made great professions, to herself, of her willingness to warm his foot-soles between her breasts, after the fashion of the nauseous Meredith poem.
But only on condition that he, her lover, loved her absolutely, with complete self-abandon.
And subtly enough, she knew he would never abandon himself FINALLY to her.
He did not believe in final self-abandonment.
He said it openly.
It was his challenge.
She was prepared to fight him for it.
For she believed in an absolute surrender to love.
She believed that love far surpassed the individual.
He said the individual was MORE than love, or than any relationship.
For him, the bright, single soul accepted love as one of its conditions, a condition of its own equilibrium.
She believed that love was EVERYTHING.
Man must render himself up to her.
He must be quaffed to the dregs by her.
Let him be HER MAN utterly, and she in return would be his humble slave—whether she wanted it or not.
Chapter 20 Gladiatorial
After the fiasco of the proposal, Birkin had hurried blindly away from Beldover, in a whirl of fury.
He felt he had been a complete fool, that the whole scene had been a farce of the first water.