rhythmically over his ear, seemed to
relax the tension. She could feel his body gradually relaxing a little,
losing its terrifying, unnatural rigidity. Her hands clutched his
limbs, his muscles, going over him spasmodically.

The hot blood began to flow again through his veins, his limbs relaxed.

'Turn round to me,' she whispered, forlorn with insistence and triumph.

So at last he was given again, warm and flexible. He turned and
gathered her in his arms. And feeling her soft against him, so
perfectly and wondrously soft and recipient, his arms tightened on her.
She was as if crushed, powerless in him. His brain seemed hard and
invincible now like a jewel, there was no resisting him.

His passion was awful to her, tense and ghastly, and impersonal, like a
destruction, ultimate. She felt it would kill her. She was being
killed.

'My God, my God,' she cried, in anguish, in his embrace, feeling her
life being killed within her. And when he was kissing her, soothing
her, her breath came slowly, as if she were really spent, dying.

'Shall I die, shall I die?' she repeated to herself.

And in the night, and in him, there was no answer to the question.

And yet, next day, the fragment of her which was not destroyed remained
intact and hostile, she did not go away, she remained to finish the
holiday, admitting nothing. He scarcely ever left her alone, but
followed her like a shadow, he was like a doom upon her, a continual
'thou shalt,' 'thou shalt not.' Sometimes it was he who seemed
strongest, whist she was almost gone, creeping near the earth like a
spent wind; sometimes it was the reverse. But always it was this
eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified
because the other was nulled.

'In the end,' she said to herself, 'I shall go away from him.'

'I can be free of her,' he said to himself in his paroxysms of
suffering.

And he set himself to be free. He even prepared to go away, to leave
her in the lurch. But for the first time there was a flaw in his will.

'Where shall I go?' he asked himself.

'Can't you be self-sufficient?' he replied to himself, putting himself
upon his pride.

'Self-sufficient!' he repeated.

It seemed to him that Gudrun was sufficient unto herself, closed round
and completed, like a thing in a case. In the calm, static reason of
his soul, he recognised this, and admitted it was her right, to be
closed round upon herself, self-complete, without desire