Page 628 - of-human-bondage-

than that, he did not understand why it should occasion so
vehement an attraction to one person rather than another.
It was irresistible: the mind could not battle with it; friend-
ship, gratitude, interest, had no power beside it. Because he
had not attracted Mildred sexually, nothing that he did had
any effect upon her. The idea revolted him; it made human
nature beastly; and he felt suddenly that the hearts of men
were full of dark places. Because Mildred was indifferent to
him he had thought her sexless; her anaemic appearance
and thin lips, the body with its narrow hips and flat chest,
the languor of her manner, carried out his supposition; and
yet she was capable of sudden passions which made her
willing to risk everything to gratify them. He had never un-
derstood her adventure with Emil Miller: it had seemed so
unlike her, and she had never been able to explain it; but
now that he had seen her with Griffiths he knew that just
the same thing had happened then: she had been carried
off her feet by an ungovernable desire. He tried to think out
what those two men had which so strangely attracted her.
They both had a vulgar facetiousness which tickled her sim-
ple sense of humour, and a certain coarseness of nature; but
what took her perhaps was the blatant sexuality which was
their most marked characteristic. She had a genteel refine-
ment which shuddered at the facts of life, she looked upon
the bodily functions as indecent, she had all sorts of euphe-
misms for common objects, she always chose an elaborate
word as more becoming than a simple one: the brutality of
these men was like a whip on her thin white shoulders, and
she shuddered with voluptuous pain.