Page 416 - lady-chatterlys-lover
P. 416

They can’t live! They only frustrate life. Their souls are aw-
       ful inside them. Death ought to be sweet to them. And I
       ought to be allowed to shoot them.’
         ’But you wouldn’t do it,’ she said.
         ’I  would  though!  and  with  less  qualms  than  I  shoot  a
       weasel. It anyhow has a prettiness and a loneliness. But they
       are legion. Oh, I’d shoot them.’
         ’Then perhaps it is just as well you daren’t.’
         ’Well.’
          Connie had now plenty to think of. It was evident he
       wanted  absolutely  to  be  free  of  Bertha  Coutts.  And  she
       felt he was right. The last attack had been too grim.—This
       meant her living alone, till spring. Perhaps she could get di-
       vorced from Clifford. But how? If Mellors were named, then
       there was an end to his divorce. How loathsome! Couldn’t
       one go right away, to the far ends of the earth, and be free
       from it all?
          One could not. The far ends of the world are not five min-
       utes from Charing Cross, nowadays. While the wireless is
       active, there are no far ends of the earth. Kings of Dahomey
       and Lamas of Tibet listen in to London and New York.
          Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intri-
       cacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get
       mangled by it.
          Connie confided in her father.
         ’You see, Father, he was Clifford’s game-keeper: but he
       was an officer in the army in India. Only he is like Colonel
       C. E. Florence, who preferred to become a private soldier
       again.’

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