Page 463 - women-in-love

He stood on the hearth-rug looking at her, at her face
that was upturned exactly like a flower, a fresh, luminous
flower, glinting faintly golden with the dew of the first light.
And he was smiling faintly as if there were no speech in the
world, save the silent delight of flowers in each other. Smil-
ingly they delighted in each other’s presence, pure presence,
not to be thought of, even known. But his eyes had a faintly
ironical contraction.
And she was drawn to him strangely, as in a spell. Kneel-
ing on the hearth-rug before him, she put her arms round
his loins, and put her face against his thigh. Riches! Riches!
She was overwhelmed with a sense of a heavenful of riches.
‘We love each other,’ she said in delight.
‘More than that,’ he answered, looking down at her with
his glimmering, easy face.
Unconsciously, with her sensitive fingertips, she was
tracing the back of his thighs, following some mysterious
life-flow there. She had discovered something, something
more than wonderful, more wonderful than life itself. It was
the strange mystery of his life-motion, there, at the back of
the thighs, down the flanks. It was a strange reality of his
being, the very stuff of being, there in the straight down-
flow of the thighs. It was here she discovered him one of the
sons of God such as were in the beginning of the world, not
a man, something other, something more.
This was release at last. She had had lovers, she had
known passion. But this was neither love nor passion. It was
the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God, the
strange inhuman sons of God who are in the beginning.

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