Page 47 - lady-chatterlys-lover

’I should have thought sexual indigestion from surfeit
would have interfered with you more seriously,’ said Ham-
mond satirically.
’Not it! I don’t over-eat myself and I don’t over-fuck my-
self. One has a choice about eating too much. But you would
absolutely starve me.’
’Not at all! You can marry.’
’How do you know I can? It may not suit the process of my
mind. Marriage might...and would...stultify my mental pro-
cesses. I’m not properly pivoted that way...and so must I be
chained in a kennel like a monk? All rot and funk, my boy. I
must live and do my calculations. I need women sometimes.
I refuse to make a mountain of it, and I refuse anybody’s
moral condemnation or prohibition. I’d be ashamed to see
a woman walking around with my name-label on her, ad-
dress and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.’
These two men had not forgiven each other about the Ju-
lia flirtation.
’It’s an amusing idea, Charlie,’ said Dukes, ‘that sex is just
another form of talk, where you act the words instead of
saying them. I suppose it’s quite true. I suppose we might
exchange as many sensations and emotions with women as
we do ideas about the weather, and so on. Sex might be a
sort of normal physical conversation between a man and
a woman. You don’t talk to a woman unless you have ideas
in common: that is you don’t talk with any interest. And in
the same way, unless you had some emotion or sympathy in
common with a woman you wouldn’t sleep with her. But if
you had...’

Lady Chatterly’s Lover