with his body, was the ultimate beauty,
to know which was almost death in itself, and yet for the
knowledge of which he would have undergone endless torture. He
would have forfeited anything, anything, rather than forego his
right even to the instep of her foot, and the place from which
the toes radiated out, the little, miraculous white plain from
which ran the little hillocks of the toes, and the folded,
dimpling hollows between the toes. He felt he would have died
rather than forfeit this.

This was what their love had become, a sensuality violent and
extreme as death. They had no conscious intimacy, no tenderness
of love. It was all the lust and the infinite, maddening
intoxication of the sense, a passion of death.

He had always, all his life, had a secret dread of Absolute
Beauty. It had always been like a fetish to him, something to
fear, really. For it was immoral and against mankind. So he had
turned to the Gothic form, which always asserted the broken
desire of mankind in its pointed arches, escaping the rolling,
absolute beauty of the round arch.

But now he had given way, and with infinite sensual violence
gave himself to the realization of this supreme, immoral,
Absolute Beauty, in the body of woman. It seemed to him, that it
came to being in the body of woman, under his touch. Under his
touch, even under his sight, it was there. But when he neither
saw nor touched the perfect place, it was not perfect, it was
not there. And he must make it exist.

But still the thing terrified him. Awful and threatening it
was, dangerous to a degree, even whilst he gave himself to it.
It was pure darkness, also. All the shameful things of the body
revealed themselves to him now with a sort of sinister, tropical
beauty. All the shameful, natural and unnatural acts of sensual
voluptuousness which he and the woman partook of together,
created together, they had their heavy beauty and their delight.
Shame, what was it? It was part of extreme delight. It was that
part of delight of which man is usually afraid. Why afraid? The
secret, shameful things are most terribly beautiful.

They accepted shame, and were one with it in their most
unlicensed pleasures. It was incorporated. It was a bud that
blossomed into beauty and heavy, fundamental gratification.

Their outward life went on much the same, but the inward life
was revolutionized. The children became less important, the
parents were absorbed in their own living.