Page 376 - lady-chatterlys-lover

the very essence of youth, that which never dies, once it is
there.
Connie woke up to the existence of legs. They became
more important to her than faces, which are no longer very
real. How few people had live, alert legs! She looked at the
men in the stalls. Great puddingy thighs in black pud-
ding-cloth, or lean wooden sticks in black funeral stuff, or
well-shaped young legs without any meaning whatever, ei-
ther sensuality or tenderness or sensitiveness, just mere
leggy ordinariness that pranced around. Not even any sen-
suality like her father’s. They were all daunted, daunted out
of existence.
But the women were not daunted. The awful mill-posts of
most females! really shocking, really enough to justify mur-
der! Or the poor thin pegs! or the trim neat things in silk
stockings, without the slightest look of life! Awful, the mil-
lions of meaningless legs prancing meaninglessly around!
But she was not happy in London. The people seemed so
spectral and blank. They had no alive happiness, no mat-
ter how brisk and good-looking they were. It was all barren.
And Connie had a woman’s blind craving for happiness, to
be assured of happiness.
In Paris at any rate she felt a bit of sensuality still. But
what a weary, tired, worn-out sensuality. Worn-out for lack
of tenderness. Oh! Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns:
weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the ten-
sion of money, money, money, weary even of resentment
and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently
Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under