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know what it meant, but it comforted her, as meaningless
things may do.
Anyhow everything was terribly silly, and she was exas-
peratedly bored by it all, by Clifford, by Aunt Eva, by Olive
and Jack, and Winterslow, and even by Dukes. Talk, talk,
talk! What hell it was, the continual rattle of it!
Then, when all the people went, it was no better. She con-
tinued plodding on, but exasperation and irritation had
got hold of her lower body, she couldn’t escape. The days
seemed to grind by, with curious painfulness, yet nothing
happened. Only she was getting thinner; even the house-
keeper noticed it, and asked her about herself Even Tommy
Dukes insisted she was not well, though she said she was
all right. Only she began to be afraid of the ghastly white
tombstones, that peculiar loathsome whiteness of Carrara
marble, detestable as false teeth, which stuck up on the hill-
side, under Tevershall church, and which she saw with such
grim painfulness from the park. The bristling of the hid-
eous false teeth of tombstones on the hill affected her with
a grisly kind of horror. She felt the time not far off when she
would be buried there, added to the ghastly host under the
tombstones and the monuments, in these filthy Midlands.
She needed help, and she knew it: so she wrote a little
CRI DU COEUR to her sister, Hilda. ‘I’m not well lately,
and I don’t know what’s the matter with me.’
Down posted Hilda from Scotland, where she had taken
up her abode. She came in March, alone, driving herself in
a nimble two-seater. Up the drive she came, tooting up the
incline, then sweeping round the oval of grass, where the

10 Lady Chatterly’s Lover