Page 675 - women-in-love

decided IT was perfect and right, the other half was wrong
and must be destroyed; so another end of the world. Or else,
Loerke’s dream of fear, the world went cold, and snow fell
everywhere, and only white creatures, polar-bears, white
foxes, and men like awful white snow-birds, persisted in ice
cruelty.
Apart from these stories, they never talked of the future.
They delighted most either in mocking imaginations of de-
struction, or in sentimental, fine marionette-shows of the
past. It was a sentimental delight to reconstruct the world
of Goethe at Weimar, or of Schiller and poverty and faithful
love, or to see again Jean Jacques in his quakings, or Voltaire
at Ferney, or Frederick the Great reading his own poetry.
They talked together for hours, of literature and sculpture
and painting, amusing themselves with Flaxman and Blake
and Fuseli, with tenderness, and with Feuerbach and Bock-
lin. It would take them a life-time, they felt to live again, IN
PETTO, the lives of the great artists. But they preferred to
stay in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.
They talked in a mixture of languages. The ground-work
was French, in either case. But he ended most of his sentenc-
es in a stumble of English and a conclusion of German, she
skilfully wove herself to her end in whatever phrase came
to her. She took a peculiar delight in this conversation. It
was full of odd, fantastic expression, of double meanings,
of evasions, of suggestive vagueness. It was a real physical
pleasure to her to make this thread of conversation out of
the different-coloured stands of three languages.
And all the while they two were hovering, hesitating

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