Page 597 - women-in-love

little delirium. And to him, she was so sweet, she was such
bliss of release, that he would have suffered a whole eternity
of torture rather than forego one second of this pang of un-
surpassable bliss.
‘My God,’ he said to her, his face drawn and strange,
transfigured, ‘what next?’
She lay perfectly still, with a still, child-like face and dark
eyes, looking at him. She was lost, fallen right away.
‘I shall always love you,’ he said, looking at her.
But she did not hear. She lay, looking at him as at some-
thing she could never understand, never: as a child looks at
a grown-up person, without hope of understanding, only
submitting.
He kissed her, kissed her eyes shut, so that she could not
look any more. He wanted something now, some recogni-
tion, some sign, some admission. But she only lay silent and
child-like and remote, like a child that is overcome and can-
not understand, only feels lost. He kissed her again, giving
up.
‘Shall we go down and have coffee and Kuchen?’ he
asked.
The twilight was falling slate-blue at the window. She
closed her eyes, closed away the monotonous level of dead
wonder, and opened them again to the every-day world.
‘Yes,’ she said briefly, regaining her will with a click. She
went again to the window. Blue evening had fallen over
the cradle of snow and over the great pallid slopes. But
in the heaven the peaks of snow were rosy, glistening like
transcendent, radiant spikes of blossom in the heavenly up-

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