Page 396 - lady-chatterlys-lover

one day upon her own daughter, as that chip of the female
block was returning from school; but the little one, instead
of kissing the loving mother’s hand, bit it firmly, and so re-
ceived from the other hand a smack in the face which sent
her reeling into the gutter: whence she was rescued by an
indignant and harassed grandmother.
The woman has blown off an amazing quantity of poi-
son-gas. She has aired in detail all those incidents of her
conjugal life which are usually buried down in the deep-
est grave of matrimonial silence, between married couples.
Having chosen to exhume them, after ten years of burial,
she has a weird array. I hear these details from Linley and
the doctor: the latter being amused. Of course there is really
nothing in it. Humanity has always had a strange avidity for
unusual sexual postures, and if a man likes to use his wife,
as Benvenuto Cellini says, ‘in the Italian way’, well that is a
matter of taste. But I had hardly expected our game-keeper
to be up to so many tricks. No doubt Bertha Coutts her-
self first put him up to them. In any case, it is a matter of
their own personal squalor, and nothing to do with any-
body else.
However, everybody listens: as I do myself. A dozen years
ago, common decency would have hushed the thing. But
common decency no longer exists, and the colliers’ wives
are all up in arms and unabashed in voice. One would think
every child in Tevershall, for the last fifty years, had been an
immaculate conception, and every one of our nonconform-
ist females was a shining Joan of Arc. That our estimable
game-keeper should have about him a touch of Rabelais