to her. He was very welcome, indeed! She was very glad
to welcome a stranger. She had been bored by the old husband. To
his latent, cruel smile she replied with brilliant challenge. He
expected her to keep the moral fortress. Not she! It was much
too dull a part. She challenged him back with a sort of
radiance, very bright and free, opposite to him. He looked at
her, and his eyes glinted. She too was out in the field.

His senses pricked up and keenly attended to her. She
laughed, perfectly indifferent and loose as he was. He came
towards her. She neither rejected him nor responded to him. In a
kind of radiance, superb in her inscrutability, she laughed
before him. She too could throw everything overboard, love,
intimacy, responsibility. What were her four children to her
now? What did it matter that this man was the father of her four
children?

He was the sensual male seeking his pleasure, she was the
female ready to take hers: but in her own way. A man could turn
into a free lance: so then could a woman. She adhered as little
as he to the moral world. All that had gone before was nothing
to her. She was another woman, under the instance of a strange
man. He was a stranger to her, seeking his own ends. Very good.
She wanted to see what this stranger would do now, what he
was.

She laughed, and kept him at arm's length, whilst apparently
ignoring him. She watched him undress as if he were a stranger.
Indeed he was a stranger to her.

And she roused him profoundly, violently, even before he
touched her. The little creature in Nottingham had but been
leading up to this. They abandoned in one motion the moral
position, each was seeking gratification pure and simple.

Strange his wife was to him. It was as if he were a perfect
stranger, as if she were infinitely and essentially strange to
him, the other half of the world, the dark half of the moon. She
waited for his touch as if he were a marauder who had come in,
infinitely unknown and desirable to her. And he began to
discover her. He had an inkling of the vastness of the unknown
sensual store of delights she was. With a passion of
voluptuousness that made him dwell on each tiny beauty, in a
kind of frenzy of enjoyment, he lit upon her: her beauty, the
beauties, the separate, several beauties of her body.

He was quite ousted from himself, and sensually transported
by that which he discovered in her. He was another man revelling
over her. There was no tendern