hink death--just dead
death--after the life I have had is the most impossible of ends.... You
don't want--particularly? I want to passionately. I _want_ to live
again--out of this body, Stephen, and all that it carves with it, to be
free--as beautiful things are free. To be free as this is free--an
exquisite clean freedom....

"I can't believe that the life of this earth is all that there is for
us--or why should we ever think it strange? Why should we still find the
ordinary matter-of-fact things of everyday strange? We do--because they
aren't--_us_.... Eating. Stuffing into ourselves thin slices of what
were queer little hot and eager beasts.... The perpetual need to do such
things. And all the mad fury of sex, Stephen!... We don't live, we
suffocate in our living bodies. They storm and rage and snatch; it isn't
_us_, Stephen, really. It can't be us. It's all so excessive--if it is
anything more than the first furious rush into existence of beings that
will go on--go on at last to quite beautiful real things. Like this
perhaps. To-day the world is beautiful indeed with the sun shining and
love shining and you, my dear, so near to me.... It's so incredible that
you and I must part to-day. It's as if--someone told me the sun was a
little mad. It's so perfectly natural to be with you again...."

Her voice sank. She leant a little forward towards me. "Stephen, suppose
that you and I were dead to-day. Suppose that when you imagined you were
climbing yesterday, you died. Suppose that yesterday you died and that
you just thought you were still climbing as you made your way to me.
Perhaps you are dead up there on the mountain and I am lying dead in my
room in this hotel, and this is the Great Beginning....

"Stephen, I am talking nonsense because I am so happy to be with you
here...."

Sec. 4

For a time we said very little. Then irregularly, disconnectedly, we
began to tell each other things about ourselves.

The substance of our lives seemed strangely objective that day; we had
as it were come to one another clean out of our common conditions. She
told me of her troubles and her secret weaknesses; we bared our spirits
and confessed. Both of us had the same tale of mean and angry and hasty
impulses, both of us could find kindred inconsistencies, both had an
exalted assurance that the other would understand completely and forgive
and love. She talked for the most part, she talked much more than I,
with a sort of wond