 any
possibility of going back on it.«
    He looked at Gerald with clear, happy eyes of discovery. Gerald looked down
at him, attracted, so deeply bondaged in fascinated attraction, that he was
mistrustful, resenting the bondage, hating the attraction.
    »We will swear to each other, one day, shall we?« pleaded Birkin. »We will
swear to stand by each other - be true to each other - ultimately - infallibly -
given to each other, organically - without possibility of taking back.«
    Birkin sought hard to express himself. But Gerald hardly listened. His face
shone with a certain luminous pleasure. He was pleased. But he kept his reserve.
He held himself back.
    »Shall we swear to each other, one day?« said Birkin, putting out his hand
towards Gerald.
    Gerald just touched the extended fine, living hand, as if with-held and
afraid.
    »We'll leave it till I understand it better,« he said, in a voice of excuse.
    Birkin watched him. A little sharp disappointment, perhaps a touch of
contempt came into his heart.
    »Yes,« he said. »You must tell me what you think, later. You know what I
mean? Not sloppy emotionalism. An impersonal union that leaves one free.«
    They lapsed both into silence. Birkin was looking at Gerald all the time. He
seemed now to see, not the physical, animal man, which he usually saw in Gerald,
and which usually he liked so much, but the man himself, complete, and as if
fated, doomed, limited. This strange sense of fatality in Gerald, as if he were
limited to one form of existence, one knowledge, one activity, a sort of fatal
halfness, which to himself seemed wholeness, always overcame Birkin after their
moments of passionate approach, and filled him with a sort of contempt, or
boredom. It was the insistence on the limitation which so bored Birkin in
Gerald. Gerald could never fly away from himself, in real indifferent gaiety. He
had a clog, a sort of monomania.
    There was silence for a time. Then Birkin said, in a lighter tone, letting
the stress of the contact pass:
    »Can't you get a good governess for Winifred? - somebody exceptional?«
    »Hermione Roddice suggested we should ask Gudrun to teach her to draw and to
model in clay. You know Winnie is astonishingly clever with that plasticine
stuff. Hermione declares she is an artist.« Gerald spoke in the usual animated,
chatty manner, as
