 how they hated each other.
    »It's all that Lady of Shalott business,« he said, in his strong abstract
voice. He seemed to be charging her before the unseeing air. »You've got that
mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight
conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There, in the mirror, you must
have everything. But now you have come to all your conclusions, you want to go
back and be like a savage, without knowledge. You want a life of pure sensation
and passion.«
    He quoted the last word satirically against her. She sat convulsed with fury
and violation, speechless, like a stricken pythoness of the Greek oracle.
    »But your passion is a lie,« he went on violently. »It isn't passion at all,
it is your will. It's your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have
them in your power. You want to have things in your power. And why? Because you
haven't got any real body, any dark sensual body of life. You have no
sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your
lust for power, to know.«
    He looked at her in mingled hate and contempt, also in pain because she
suffered, and in shame because he knew he tortured her. He had an impulse to
kneel and plead for forgiveness. But a bitterer red anger burned up to fury in
him. He became unconscious of her, he was only a passionate voice speaking.
    »Spontaneous!« he cried. »You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate
thing that ever walked or crawled! You'd be verily deliberately spontaneous -
that's you. Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your
deliberate voluntary consciousness. You want it all in that loathsome little
skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut. For you'll be the same till
it is cracked, like an insect in its skin. If one cracked your skull perhaps one
might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As
it is, what you want is pornography - looking at yourself in mirrors, watching
your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your
consciousness, make it all mental.«
    There was a sense of violation in the air, as if too much was said, the
unforgivable. Yet Ursula was concerned now only with solving her own problems,
in the light of
