Page 102 - lady-chatterlys-lover

but no healthy human sensuality, that warms the blood and
freshens the whole being.
Still she thought the most beautiful part of her was the
long-sloping fall of the haunches from the socket of the back,
and the slumberous, round stillness of the buttocks. Like
hillocks of sand, the Arabs say, soft and downward-slipping
with a long slope. Here the life still lingered hoping. But
here too she was thinner, and going unripe, astringent.
But the front of her body made her miserable. It was al-
ready beginning to slacken, with a slack sort of thinness,
almost withered, going old before it had ever really lived.
She thought of the child she might somehow bear. Was she
fit, anyhow?
She slipped into her nightdress, and went to bed, where
she sobbed bitterly. And in her bitterness burned a cold in-
dignation against Clifford, and his writings and his talk:
against all the men of his sort who defrauded a woman even
of her own body.
Unjust! Unjust! The sense of deep physical injustice
burned to her very soul.
But in the morning, all the same, she was up at seven, and
going downstairs to Clifford. She had to help him in all the
intimate things, for he had no man, and refused a woman-
servant. The housekeeper’s husband, who had known him
as a boy, helped him, and did any heavy lifting; but Connie
did the personal things, and she did them willingly. It was a
demand on her, but she had wanted to do what she could.
So she hardly ever went away from Wragby, and never
for more than a day or two; when Mrs Betts, the housekeep-

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