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how didn’t have any; at least, not where it’s supposed to be.
I got thinner and crazier. Then I said we’d got to be lovers. I
talked her into it, as usual. So she let me. I was excited, and
she never wanted it. She just didn’t want it. She adored me,
she loved me to talk to her and kiss her: in that way she had
a passion for me. But the other, she just didn’t want. And
there are lots of women like her. And it was just the other
that I did want. So there we split. I was cruel, and left her.
Then I took on with another girl, a teacher, who had made
a scandal by carrying on with a married man and driving
him nearly out of his mind. She was a soft, white-skinned,
soft sort of a woman, older than me, and played the fiddle.
And she was a demon. She loved everything about love, ex-
cept the sex. Clinging, caressing, creeping into you in every
way: but if you forced her to the sex itself, she just ground
her teeth and sent out hate. I forced her to it, and she could
simply numb me with hate because of it. So I was balked
again. I loathed all that. I wanted a woman who wanted me,
and wanted IT.
’Then came Bertha Coutts. They’d lived next door to us
when I was a little lad, so I knew ‘em all right. And they were
common. Well, Bertha went away to some place or other in
Birmingham; she said, as a lady’s companion; everybody
else said, as a waitress or something in a hotel. Anyhow just
when I was more than fed up with that other girl, when I
was twenty-one, back comes Bertha, with airs and graces
and smart clothes and a sort of bloom on her: a sort of sen-
sual bloom that you’d see sometimes on a woman, or on a
trolly. Well, I was in a state of murder. I chucked up my job