Page 662 - women-in-love

question.
And yet, next day, the fragment of her which was not
destroyed remained intact and hostile, she did not go away,
she remained to finish the holiday, admitting nothing. He
scarcely ever left her alone, but followed her like a shadow,
he was like a doom upon her, a continual ‘thou shalt,’ ‘thou
shalt not.’ Sometimes it was he who seemed strongest, whist
she was almost gone, creeping near the earth like a spent
wind; sometimes it was the reverse. But always it was this
eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist,
one ratified because the other was nulled.
‘In the end,’ she said to herself, ‘I shall go away from
him.’
‘I can be free of her,’ he said to himself in his paroxysms
of suffering.
And he set himself to be free. He even prepared to go
away, to leave her in the lurch. But for the first time there
was a flaw in his will.
‘Where shall I go?’ he asked himself.
‘Can’t you be self-sufficient?’ he replied to himself, put-
ting himself upon his pride.
‘Self-sufficient!’ he repeated.
It seemed to him that Gudrun was sufficient unto her-
self, closed round and completed, like a thing in a case. In
the calm, static reason of his soul, he recognised this, and
admitted it was her right, to be closed round upon herself,
self-complete, without desire. He realised it, he admitted it,
it only needed one last effort on his own part, to win for
himself the same completeness. He knew that it only need-

662 Women in Love