Page 385 - sons-and-lovers

sure He’s not soulful.’
And then it seemed to her that Paul was arguing God on
to his own side, because he wanted his own way and his own
pleasure. There was a long battle between him and her. He
was utterly unfaithful to her even in her own presence; then
he was ashamed, then repentant; then he hated her, and
went off again. Those were the ever-recurring conditions.
She fretted him to the bottom of his soul. There she re-
mained—sad, pensive, a worshipper. And he caused her
sorrow. Half the time he grieved for her, half the time he
hated her. She was his conscience; and he felt, somehow, he
had got a conscience that was too much for him. He could
not leave her, because in one way she did hold the best of
him. He could not stay with her because she did not take the
rest of him, which was three-quarters. So he chafed himself
into rawness over her.
When she was twenty-one he wrote her a letter which
could only have been written to her.
‘May I speak of our old, worn love, this last time. It, too,
is changing, is it not? Say, has not the body of that love died,
and left you its invulnerable soul? You see, I can give you a
spirit love, I have given it you this long, long time; but not
embodied passion. See, you are a nun. I have given you what
I would give a holy nun—as a mystic monk to a mystic nun.
Surely you esteem it best. Yet you regret—no, have regret-
ted—the other. In all our relations no body enters. I do not
talk to you through the senses—rather through the spirit.
That is why we cannot love in the common sense. Ours is
not an everyday affection. As yet we are mortal, and to live

Sons and Lovers