'As you please, or as you don't please,' she echoed. 'Marriage is a social arrangement, I take it, and has nothing to do with the question of love.'
His eyes were flickering on her all the time.
She felt as is he were kissing her freely and malevolently.
It made the colour burn in her cheeks, but her heart was quite firm and unfailing.
'You think Rupert is off his head a bit?' Gerald asked.
Her eyes flashed with acknowledgment.
'As regards a woman, yes,' she said, 'I do.
There IS such a thing as two people being in love for the whole of their lives—perhaps.
But marriage is neither here nor there, even then.
If they are in love, well and good.
If not—why break eggs about it!'
'Yes,' said Gerald. 'That's how it strikes me.
But what about Rupert?'
'I can't make out—neither can he nor anybody.
He seems to think that if you marry you can get through marriage into a third heaven, or something—all very vague.'
'Very!
And who wants a third heaven?
As a matter of fact, Rupert has a great yearning to be SAFE—to tie himself to the mast.'
'Yes.
It seems to me he's mistaken there too,' said Gudrun. 'I'm sure a mistress is more likely to be faithful than a wife—just because she is her OWN mistress.
No—he says he believes that a man and wife can go further than any other two beings—but WHERE, is not explained.
They can know each other, heavenly and hellish, but particularly hellish, so perfectly that they go beyond heaven and hell—into—there it all breaks down—into nowhere.'
'Into Paradise, he says,' laughed Gerald.
Gudrun shrugged her shoulders. 'FE M'EN FICHE of your Paradise!' she said.
'Not being a Mohammedan,' said Gerald.
Birkin sat motionless, driving the car, quite unconscious of what they said.
And Gudrun, sitting immediately behind him, felt a sort of ironic pleasure in thus exposing him.
'He says,' she added, with a grimace of irony, 'that you can find an eternal equilibrium in marriage, if you accept the unison, and still leave yourself separate, don't try to fuse.'
'Doesn't inspire me,' said Gerald.
'That's just it,' said Gudrun.
'I believe in love, in a real ABANDON, if you're capable of it,' said Gerald.
'So do I,' said she.
'And so does Rupert, too—though he is always shouting.'
'No,' said Gudrun. 'He won't abandon himself to the other person.
You can't be sure of him.
That's the trouble I think.'
'Yet he wants marriage!
Marriage—ET PUIS?'
'Le paradis!' mocked Gudrun.
Birkin, as he drove, felt a creeping of the spine, as if somebody was threatening his neck.
But he shrugged with indifference.
It began to rain.
Here was a change.
He stopped the car and got down to put up the hood.
Chapter 22 Woman to Woman
They came to the town, and left Gerald at the railway station.
Gudrun and Winifred were to come to tea with Birkin, who expected Ursula also.
In the afternoon, however, the first person to turn up was Hermione.
Birkin was out, so she went in the drawing-room, looking at his books and papers, and playing on the piano.
Then Ursula arrived.