Page 76 - lady-chatterlys-lover

and underneath feeling nothing at all.
’Every sort of a good time, damn it, every sort! Dress,
jewels up to a point, any nightclub you like, know anybody
you want to know, live the pace...travel and be somebody
wherever you go...Darn it, every sort of good time.’
He spoke it almost in a brilliancy of triumph, and Con-
nie looked at him as if dazzled, and really feeling nothing at
all. Hardly even the surface of her mind was tickled at the
glowing prospects he offered her. Hardly even her most out-
side self responded, that at any other time would have been
thrilled. She just got no feeling from it, she couldn’t ‘go off’.
She just sat and stared and looked dazzled, and felt nothing,
only somewhere she smelt the extraordinarily unpleasant
smell of the bitch-goddess.
Mick sat on tenterhooks, leaning forward in his chair,
glaring at her almost hysterically: and whether he was more
anxious out of vanity for her to say Yes! or whether he was
more panic-stricken for fear she SHOULD say Yes!—who
can tell?
’I should have to think about it,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t say
now. It may seem to you Clifford doesn’t count, but he does.
When you think how disabled he is...’
’Oh damn it all! If a fellow’s going to trade on his disabili-
ties, I might begin to say how lonely I am, and always have
been, and all the rest of the my-eye-Betty-Martin sob-stuff!
Damn it all, if a fellow’s got nothing but disabilities to rec-
ommend him...’
He turned aside, working his hands furiously in his trou-
sers pockets. That evening he said to her: