'It seems to me the right thing to do, you know, with the Pussums, is to pay them.'
'And the right thing for mistresses: keep them.
And the right thing for wives: live under the same roof with them.
Integer vitae scelerisque purus—' said Birkin.
'There's no need to be nasty about it,' said Gerald.
'It bores me.
I'm not interested in your peccadilloes.'
'And I don't care whether you are or not—I am.'
The morning was again sunny.
The maid had been in and brought the water, and had drawn the curtains.
Birkin, sitting up in bed, looked lazily and pleasantly out on the park, that was so green and deserted, romantic, belonging to the past.
He was thinking how lovely, how sure, how formed, how final all the things of the past were—the lovely accomplished past—this house, so still and golden, the park slumbering its centuries of peace.
And then, what a snare and a delusion, this beauty of static things—what a horrible, dead prison Breadalby really was, what an intolerable confinement, the peace!
Yet it was better than the sordid scrambling conflict of the present.
If only one might create the future after one's own heart—for a little pure truth, a little unflinching application of simple truth to life, the heart cried out ceaselessly.
'I can't see what you will leave me at all, to be interested in,' came Gerald's voice from the lower room. 'Neither the Pussums, nor the mines, nor anything else.'
'You be interested in what you can, Gerald.
Only I'm not interested myself,' said Birkin.
'What am I to do at all, then?' came Gerald's voice.
'What you like.
What am I to do myself?'
In the silence Birkin could feel Gerald musing this fact.
'I'm blest if I know,' came the good-humoured answer.
'You see,' said Birkin, 'part of you wants the Pussum, and nothing but the Pussum, part of you wants the mines, the business, and nothing but the business—and there you are—all in bits—'
'And part of me wants something else,' said Gerald, in a queer, quiet, real voice.
'What?' said Birkin, rather surprised.
'That's what I hoped you could tell me,' said Gerald.
There was a silence for some time.
'I can't tell you—I can't find my own way, let alone yours.
You might marry,' Birkin replied.
'Who—the Pussum?' asked Gerald.
'Perhaps,' said Birkin.
And he rose and went to the window.
'That is your panacea,' said Gerald. 'But you haven't even tried it on yourself yet, and you are sick enough.'
'I am,' said Birkin. 'Still, I shall come right.'
'Through marriage?'
'Yes,' Birkin answered obstinately.
'And no,' added Gerald. 'No, no, no, my boy.'
There was a silence between them, and a strange tension of hostility.
They always kept a gap, a distance between them, they wanted always to be free each of the other.
Yet there was a curious heart-straining towards each other.
'Salvator femininus,' said Gerald, satirically.
'Why not?' said Birkin.
'No reason at all,' said Gerald, 'if it really works.
But whom will you marry?'
'A woman,' said Birkin.
'Good,' said Gerald.
Birkin and Gerald were the last to come down to breakfast.
Hermione liked everybody to be early.
She suffered when she felt her day was diminished, she felt she had missed her life.