And it was this duality in feeling which he created in her, that made a fine hate of him quicken in her bowels. There was his wonderful, desirable life-rapidity, the rare quality of an utterly desirable man: and there was at the same time this ridiculous, mean effacement into a Salvator Mundi and a Sunday-school teacher, a prig of the stiffest type.
He looked up at her. He saw her face strangely enkindled, as if suffused from within by a powerful sweet fire. His soul was arrested in wonder. She was enkindled in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder and in pure, perfect attraction, he moved towards her. She sat like a strange queen, almost supernatural in her glowing smiling richness.
“The point about love,” he said, his consciousness quickly adjusting itself, “is that we hate the word because we have vulgarised it. It ought to be prescribed, tabooed from utterance, for many years, till we get a new, better idea.”
There was a beam of understanding between them.
“But it always means the same thing,” she said.
“Ah God, no, let it not mean that any more,” he cried. “Let the old meanings go.”
“But still it is love,” she persisted. A strange, wicked yellow light shone at him in her eyes.
He hesitated, baffled, withdrawing.
“No,” he said, “it isn’t. Spoken like that, never in the world. You’ve no business to utter the word.”
“I must leave it to you, to take it out of the Ark of the Covenant at the right moment,” she mocked.