Page 345 - lady-chatterlys-lover

’What do you think of this, by the way?’ he said, reaching
for his book. ‘You’d have no need to cool your ardent body
by running out in the rain, if only we have a few more aeons
of evolution behind us. Ah, here it is!—’’The universe shows
us two aspects: on one side it is physically wasting, on the
other it is spiritually ascending.’’’
Connie listened, expecting more. But Clifford was wait-
ing. She looked at him in surprise.
’And if it spiritually ascends,’ she said, ‘what does it leave
down below, in the place where its tail used to be?’
’Ah!’ he said. ‘Take the man for what he means. AS-
CENDING is the opposite of his WASTING, I presume.’
’Spiritually blown out, so to speak!’
’No, but seriously, without joking: do you think there is
anything in it?’
She looked at him again.
’Physically wasting?’ she said. ‘I see you getting fatter,
and I’m sot wasting myself. Do you think the sun is smaller
than he used to be? He’s not to me. And I suppose the ap-
ple Adam offered Eve wasn’t really much bigger, if any, than
one of our orange pippins. Do you think it was?’
’Well, hear how he goes on: ‘’It is thus slowly passing,
with a slowness inconceivable in our measures of time, to
new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as
we at present know it, will he represented by a ripple barely
to be distinguished from nonentity.’’’
She listened with a glisten of amusement. All sorts of im-
proper things suggested themselves. But she only said:
’What silly hocus-pocus! As if his little conceited con-

Lady Chatterly’s Lover