She spoke nervously. She could still see on Connie’s face the smoothness and the half-dream of passion, and she could feel the irritation against herself.
“Quite!” said Connie. And she could say no more.
The two women plodded on through the wet world, in silence, while great drops splashed like explosions in the wood. When they came to the park, Connie strode ahead, and Mrs. Bolton panted a little. She was getting plumper.
“How foolish of Clifford to make a fuss!” said Connie at length, angrily, really speaking to herself.
“Oh, you know what men are! They like working themselves up. But he’ll be all right as soon as he sees your ladyship.”
Connie was very angry that Mrs. Bolton knew her secret: for certainly she knew it.
Suddenly Constance stood still on the path.
“It’s monstrous that I should have to be followed!” she said, her eyes flashing.
“Oh! your Ladyship, don’t say that! He’d certainly have sent the two men, and they’d have come straight to the hut. I didn’t know where it was, really.”
Connie flushed darker with rage, at the suggestion. Yet, while her passion was on her, she could not lie. She could not even pretend there was nothing between herself and the keeper. She looked at the other woman, who stood so sly, with her head dropped: yet somehow, in her femaleness, an ally.
“Oh well!” she said. “If it is so, it is so. I don’t mind!”
“Why, you’re all right, my Lady! You’ve only been sheltering in the hut. It’s absolutely nothing.”
They went on to the house. Connie marched in to Clifford’s room, furious with him, furious with his pale, overwrought face and prominent eyes.
“I must say, I don’t think you need send the servants after me!” she burst out.
“My God!” he exploded. “Where have you been, woman? You’ve been gone hours, hours, and in a storm like this! What the hell do you go to that bloody wood for? What have you been up to? It’s hours even since the rain stopped, hours! Do you know what time it is? You’re enough to drive anybody mad. Where have you been? What in the name of hell have you been doing?”
“And what if I don’t choose to tell you?” She pulled her hat from her head and shook her hair.
He looked at her with his eyes bulging, and yellow coming into the whites. It was very bad for him to get into these rages: Mrs. Bolton had a weary time with him, for days after. Connie felt a sudden qualm.
“But really!” she said, milder, “Anyone would think I’d been I don’t know where! I just sat in the hut during all the storm, and made myself a little fire, and was happy.”
She spoke now easily. After all, why work him up any more! He looked at her suspiciously.
“And look at your hair!” he said; “look at yourself!”
“Yes!” she replied calmly. “I ran out in the rain with no clothes on.”
He stared at her speechless.
“You must be mad!” he said.
“Why? To like a shower-bath from the rain?”
“And how did you dry yourself?”
“On an old towel and at the fire.”
He still stared at her in a dumbfounded way.
“And supposing anybody came,” he said.
“Who would come?”
“Who? Why anybody! And Mellors. Does he come? He must come in the evenings.”
“Yes, he came later, when it had cleared up, to feed the pheasants with corn.”
She spoke with amazing nonchalance. Mrs. Bolton, who was listening in the next room, heard in sheer admiration. To think a woman could carry it off so naturally!
“And suppose he’d come while you were running about in the rain with nothing on, like a maniac?”
“I suppose he’d have had the fright of his life, and cleared out as fast as he could.”
Clifford still stared at her transfixed. What he thought in his under-consciousness he would never know. And he was too much taken aback to form one clear thought in his upper-consciousness. He just simply accepted what she said, in a sort of blank. And he admired her. He could not help admiring her. She looked so flushed and handsome and smooth: love smooth.
“At least,” he said, subsiding, “you’ll be lucky if you’ve got off without a severe cold.”
“Oh, I haven’t got a cold,” she replied. She was thinking to herself of the other man’s words: Tha’s got the nicest woman’s arse of anybody! She wished, she dearly wished she could tell Clifford that this had been said her, during the famous thunderstorm. However! She bore herself rather like an offended queen, and went upstairs to change.
That evening, Clifford wanted to be nice to her. He was reading one of the latest scientific-religious books: he had a streak of a spurious sort of religion in him, and was egocentrically concerned with the future of his own ego. It was like his habit to make conversation to Connie about some book, since the conversation between them had to be made, almost chemically. They had almost chemically to concoct it in their heads.
“What do you think of this, by the way?” he said, reaching for his book. “You’d have no need to cool your ardent body by running out in the rain, if only we had a few more aeons of evolution behind us. Ah here it is!—‘The universe shows us two aspects: on one side it is physically wasting, on the other it is spiritually ascending.’ ”
Connie listened, expecting more. But Clifford was waiting. She looked at him in surprise.
“And if it spiritually ascends,” she said, “what does it leave down below, in the place where its tail used to be?”
“Ah!” he said. “Take the man for what he means. Ascending is the opposite of
