away,
breaking his fingers from their hold on her, persistently,
ruthlessly. He wanted her to have pity. And sometimes for a
moment she had pity. But she always began again, thrusting him
off, into the deep water, into the frenzy and agony of
uncertainty.

She became like a fury to him, without any sense of him. Her
eyes were bright with a cold, unmoving hatred. Then his heart
seemed to die in its last fear. She might push him off into the
deeps.

She would not sleep with him any more. She said he destroyed
her sleep. Up started all his frenzy and madness of fear and
suffering. She drove him away. Like a cowed, lurking devil he
was driven off, his mind working cunningly against her, devising
evil for her. But she drove him off. In his moments of intense
suffering, she seemed to him inconceivable, a monster, the
principle of cruelty.

However her pity might give way for moments, she was hard and
cold as a jewel. He must be put off from her, she must sleep
alone. She made him a bed in the small room.

And he lay there whipped, his soul whipped almost to death,
yet unchanged. He lay in agony of suffering, thrown back into
unreality, like a man thrown overboard into a sea, to swim till
he sinks, because there is no hold, only a wide, weltering
sea.

He did not sleep, save for the white sleep when a thin veil
is drawn over the mind. It was not sleep. He was awake, and he
was not awake. He could not be alone. He needed to be able to
put his arms round her. He could not bear the empty space
against his breast, where she used to be. He could not bear it.
He felt as if he were suspended in space, held there by the grip
of his will. If he relaxed his will would fall, fall through
endless space, into the bottomless pit, always falling,
will-less, helpless, non-existent, just dropping to extinction,
falling till the fire of friction had burned out, like a falling
star, then nothing, nothing, complete nothing.

He rose in the morning grey and unreal. And she seemed fond
of him again, she seemed to make up to him a little.

"I slept well," she said, with her slightly false brightness.
"Did you?"

"All right," he answered.

He would never tell her.

For three or four nights he lay alone through the white
sleep, his will unchanged, unchanged, still tense, fixed in its
grip. Then, as if she were revived and free to be fond of him
again, deluded by his silence and seeming acquiescence, moved
also by pity, she took him