ssed
herself into soft flow of his kiss, pressed herself down, down
to the source and core of his kiss, herself covered and
enveloped in the warm, fecund flow of his kiss, that travelled
over her, flowed over her, covered her, flowed over the last
fibre of her, so they were one stream, one dark fecundity, and
she clung at the core of him, with her lips holding open the
very bottommost source of him.

So they stood in the utter, dark kiss, that triumphed over
them both, subjected them, knitted them into one fecund nucleus
of the fluid darkness.

It was bliss, it was the nucleolating of the fecund darkness.
Once the vessel had vibrated till it was shattered, the light of
consciousness gone, then the darkness reigned, and the
unutterable satisfaction.

They stood enjoying the unmitigated kiss, taking it, giving
to it endlessly, and still it was not exhausted. Their veins
fluttered, their blood ran together as one stream.

Till gradually a sleep, a heaviness settled on them, a
drowse, and out of the drowse, a small light of consciousness
woke up. Ursula became aware of the night around her, the water
lapping and running full just near, the trees roaring and
soughing in gusts of wind.

She kept near to him, in contact with him, but she became
ever more and more herself. And she knew she must go to catch
her train. But she did not want to draw away from contact with
him.

At length they roused and set out. No longer they existed in
the unblemished darkness. There was the glitter of a bridge, the
twinkle of lights across the river, the big flare of the town in
front and on their right.

But still, dark and soft and incontestable, their bodies
walked untouched by the lights, darkness supreme and
arrogant.

"The stupid lights," Ursula said to herself, in her dark
sensual arrogance. "The stupid, artificial, exaggerated town,
fuming its lights. It does not exist really. It rests upon the
unlimited darkness, like a gleam of coloured oil on dark water,
but what is it?--nothing, just nothing."

In the tram, in the train, she felt the same. The lights, the
civic uniform was a trick played, the people as they moved or
sat were only dummies exposed. She could see, beneath their
pale, wooden pretence of composure and civic purposefulness, the
dark stream that contained them all. They were like little paper
ships in their motion. But in reality each one was a dark,
blind, eager wave urging blindly forward, dark with the s