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issue, for goodness, for righteousness, for oneness with the
ultimate purpose. That the ultimate purpose might be the
perfect and subtle experience of the process of death, the
will being kept unimpaired, that was not allowed in him.
And this was his limitation.
There was a hovering triumph in Loerke, since Gudrun
had denied her marriage with Gerald. The artist seemed to
hover like a creature on the wing, waiting to settle. He did
not approach Gudrun violently, he was never ill-timed. But
carried on by a sure instinct in the complete darkness of
his soul, he corresponded mystically with her, impercepti-
bly, but palpably.
For two days, he talked to her, continued the discussions
of art, of life, in which they both found such pleasure. They
praised the by-gone things, they took a sentimental, childish
delight in the achieved perfections of the past. Particularly
they liked the late eighteenth century, the period of Goethe
and of Shelley, and Mozart.
They played with the past, and with the great figures of
the past, a sort of little game of chess, or marionettes, all to
please themselves. They had all the great men for their mar-
ionettes, and they two were the God of the show, working
it all. As for the future, that they never mentioned except
one laughed out some mocking dream of the destruction of
the world by a ridiculous catastrophe of man’s invention: a
man invented such a perfect explosive that it blew the earth
in two, and the two halves set off in different directions
through space, to the dismay of the inhabitants: or else the
people of the world divided into two halves, and each half

674 Women in Love