own ends. You
don't want to serve ME, and yet you want me to serve you. It is so
one-sided!'

It was a great effort to him to maintain this conversation, and to
press for the thing he wanted from her, the surrender of her spirit.

'It is different,' he said. 'The two kinds of service are so different.
I serve you in another way--not through YOURSELF--somewhere else. But I
want us to be together without bothering about ourselves--to be really
together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a not
a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.'

'No,' she said, pondering. 'You are just egocentric. You never have any
enthusiasm, you never come out with any spark towards me. You want
yourself, really, and your own affairs. And you want me just to be
there, to serve you.'

But this only made him shut off from her.

'Ah well,' he said, 'words make no matter, any way. The thing IS
between us, or it isn't.'

'You don't even love me,' she cried.

'I do,' he said angrily. 'But I want--' His mind saw again the lovely
golden light of spring transfused through her eyes, as through some
wonderful window. And he wanted her to be with him there, in this world
of proud indifference. But what was the good of telling her he wanted
this company in proud indifference. What was the good of talking, any
way? It must happen beyond the sound of words. It was merely ruinous to
try to work her by conviction. This was a paradisal bird that could
never be netted, it must fly by itself to the heart.

'I always think I am going to be loved--and then I am let down. You
DON'T love me, you know. You don't want to serve me. You only want
yourself.'

A shiver of rage went over his veins, at this repeated: 'You don't want
to serve me.' All the paradisal disappeared from him.

'No,' he said, irritated, 'I don't want to serve you, because there is
nothing there to serve. What you want me to serve, is nothing, mere
nothing. It isn't even you, it is your mere female quality. And I
wouldn't give a straw for your female ego--it's a rag doll.'

'Ha!' she laughed in mockery. 'That's all you think of me, is it? And
then you have the impudence to say you love me.'

She rose in anger, to go home.

You want the paradisal unknowing,' she said, turning round on him as he
still sat half-visible in the shadow. 'I know what that means, thank
you. You want me to be your thing, never to criticise you or to have
anything to say for myself. Y