But the passion of gratitude with which he received her into his soul, the extreme, unthinkable gladness of knowing himself living and fit to unite with her, he, who was so nearly dead, who was so near to being gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death, could never be understood by her.
He worshipped her as age worships youth, he gloried in her, because, in his one grain of faith, he was young as she, he was her proper mate.
This marriage with her was his resurrection and his life.
All this she could not know.
She wanted to be made much of, to be adored.
There were infinite distances of silence between them.
How could he tell her of the immanence of her beauty, that was not form, or weight, or colour, but something like a strange, golden light!
How could he know himself what her beauty lay in, for him.
He said
'Your nose is beautiful, your chin is adorable.'
But it sounded like lies, and she was disappointed, hurt.
Even when he said, whispering with truth,
'I love you, I love you,' it was not the real truth.
It was something beyond love, such a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence.
How could he say "I" when he was something new and unknown, not himself at all?
This I, this old formula of the age, was a dead letter.
In the new, superfine bliss, a peace superseding knowledge, there was no I and you, there was only the third, unrealised wonder, the wonder of existing not as oneself, but in a consummation of my being and of her being in a new one, a new, paradisal unit regained from the duality.
Nor can I say
'I love you,' when I have ceased to be, and you have ceased to be: we are both caught up and transcended into a new oneness where everything is silent, because there is nothing to answer, all is perfect and at one.
Speech travels between the separate parts.
But in the perfect One there is perfect silence of bliss.
They were married by law on the next day, and she did as he bade her, she wrote to her father and mother.
Her mother replied, not her father.
She did not go back to school.
She stayed with Birkin in his rooms, or at the Mill, moving with him as he moved.
But she did not see anybody, save Gudrun and Gerald.
She was all strange and wondering as yet, but relieved as by dawn.
Gerald sat talking to her one afternoon in the warm study down at the Mill.
Rupert had not yet come home.
'You are happy?' Gerald asked her, with a smile.
'Very happy!' she cried, shrinking a little in her brightness.
'Yes, one can see it.'
'Can one?' cried Ursula in surprise.
He looked up at her with a communicative smile.
'Oh yes, plainly.'
She was pleased.
She meditated a moment.
'And can you see that Rupert is happy as well?'
He lowered his eyelids, and looked aside.
'Oh yes,' he said.
'Really!'
'Oh yes.'
He was very quiet, as if it were something not to be talked about by him.
He seemed sad.
She was very sensitive to suggestion.
She asked the question he wanted her to ask.
'Why don't you be happy as well?' she said. 'You could be just the same.'
He paused a moment.
'With Gudrun?' he asked.
'Yes!' she cried, her eyes glowing.