Page 270 - women-in-love

dead. The worst of it is, they cling on to the living, and won’t
let go.’
She pondered for a time.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The FACT of death doesn’t really seem to
matter much, does it?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘What does it matter if Diana Crich is alive
or dead?’
‘Doesn’t it?’ she said, shocked.
‘No, why should it? Better she were dead—she’ll be much
more real. She’ll be positive in death. In life she was a fret-
ting, negated thing.’
‘You are rather horrible,’ murmured Ursula.
‘No! I’d rather Diana Crich were dead. Her living some-
how, was all wrong. As for the young man, poor devil—he’ll
find his way out quickly instead of slowly. Death is all
right—nothing better.’
‘Yet you don’t want to die,’ she challenged him.
He was silent for a time. Then he said, in a voice that was
frightening to her in its change:
‘I should like to be through with it—I should like to be
through with the death process.’
‘And aren’t you?’ asked Ursula nervously.
They walked on for some way in silence, under the trees.
Then he said, slowly, as if afraid:
‘There is life which belongs to death, and there is life
which isn’t death. One is tired of the life that belongs to
death—our kind of life. But whether it is finished, God
knows. I want love that is like sleep, like being born again,
vulnerable as a baby that just comes into the world.’

270 Women in Love