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her it was only travel.
‘To be free,’ he said. ‘To be free, in a free place, with a few
other people!’
‘Yes,’ she said wistfully. Those ‘few other people’ de-
pressed her.
‘It isn’t really a locality, though,’ he said. ‘It’s a perfected
relation between you and me, and others—the perfect rela-
tion—so that we are free together.’
‘It is, my love, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘It’s you and me. It’s you
and me, isn’t it?’ She stretched out her arms to him. He went
across and stooped to kiss her face. Her arms closed round
him again, her hands spread upon his shoulders, moving
slowly there, moving slowly on his back, down his back slow-
ly, with a strange recurrent, rhythmic motion, yet moving
slowly down, pressing mysteriously over his loins, over his
flanks. The sense of the awfulness of riches that could never
be impaired flooded her mind like a swoon, a death in most
marvellous possession, mystic-sure. She possessed him so
utterly and intolerably, that she herself lapsed out. And yet
she was only sitting still in the chair, with her hands pressed
upon him, and lost.
Again he softly kissed her.
‘We shall never go apart again,’ he murmured quietly.
And she did not speak, but only pressed her hands firmer
down upon the source of darkness in him.
They decided, when they woke again from the pure
swoon, to write their resignations from the world of work
there and then. She wanted this.
He rang the bell, and ordered note-paper without a print-

468 Women in Love