Page 90 - lady-chatterlys-lover

going, you needed money. You had to have it. Money you
HAVE to have. You needn’t really have anything else. So
that’s that!
Since, of course, it’s not your own fault you are alive.
Once you are alive, money is a necessity, and the only ab-
solute necessity. All the rest you can get along without, at a
pinch. But not money. Emphatically, that’s THAT!
She thought of Michaelis, and the money she might have
had with him; and even that she didn’t want. She preferred
the lesser amount which she helped Clifford to make by his
writing. That she actually helped to make.—’Clifford and I
together, we make twelve hundred a year out of writing’; so
she put it to herself. Make money! Make it! Out of nowhere.
Wring it out of the thin air! The last feat to be humanly
proud of! The rest all-my-eye-Betty-Martin.
So she plodded home to Clifford, to join forces with
him again, to make another story out of nothingness: and
a story meant money. Clifford seemed to care very much
whether his stories were considered first-class literature or
not. Strictly, she didn’t care. Nothing in it! said her father.
Twelve hundred pounds last year! was the retort simple and
final.
If you were young, you just set your teeth, and bit on
and held on, till the money began to flow from the invis-
ible; it was a question of power. It was a question of will; a
subtle, subtle, powerful emanation of will out of yourself
brought back to you the mysterious nothingness of money
a word on a bit of paper. It was a sort of magic, certainly it
was triumph. The bitch-goddess! Well, if one had to prosti-