Page 666 - women-in-love

had destroyed it for her, she was straining after a dead ef-
fect.
‘One day,’ he said, softly, looking up at her, ‘I shall de-
stroy YOU, as you stand looking at the sunset; because you
are such a liar.’
There was a soft, voluptuous promise to himself in the
words. She was chilled but arrogant.
‘Ha!’ she said. ‘I am not afraid of your threats!’ She de-
nied herself to him, she kept her room rigidly private to
herself. But he waited on, in a curious patience, belonging
to his yearning for her.
‘In the end,’ he said to himself with real voluptuous prom-
ise, ‘when it reaches that point, I shall do away with her.’
And he trembled delicately in every limb, in anticipation,
as he trembled in his most violent accesses of passionate ap-
proach to her, trembling with too much desire.
She had a curious sort of allegiance with Loerke, all the
while, now, something insidious and traitorous. Gerald
knew of it. But in the unnatural state of patience, and the
unwillingness to harden himself against her, in which he
found himself, he took no notice, although her soft kindli-
ness to the other man, whom he hated as a noxious insect,
made him shiver again with an access of the strange shud-
dering that came over him repeatedly.
He left her alone only when he went skiing, a sport he
loved, and which she did not practise. The he seemed to
sweep out of life, to be a projectile into the beyond. And
often, when he went away, she talked to the little German
sculptor. They had an invariable topic, in their art.

666 Women in Love