, disgusted him. It was a whole community
of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in
couples, and no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested
relationship admitted: a kaleidoscope of couples, disjoined, separatist,
meaningless entities of married couples. True, he hated promiscuity even worse
than marriage, and a liaison was only another kind of coupling, reactionary from
the legal marriage. Reaction was a greater bore than action.
    On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned
a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other broken half. And
he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in herself. He wanted sex to
revert to the level of the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional
process, not as a fulfilment. He believed in sex marriage. But beyond this, he
wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure
beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like
two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.
    He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for
unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. Desire and aspiration should
find their object without all this torture, as now, in a world of plenty of
water, simple thirst is inconsiderable, satisfied almost unconsciously. And he
wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet
balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love
was become madly abhorrent to him.
    But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had
such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to
have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to
her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded everything
and to whom everything must finally be rendered up.
    It filled him with almost insane fury, this calm assumption of the Magna
Mater, that all was hers, because she had borne it. Man was hers because she had
borne him. A Mater Dolorosa, she had borne him, a Magna Mater, she now claimed
him again, soul and body, sex, meaning, and all. He had a horror of the Magna
Mater, she was detestable.
    She was on a very high horse again was woman, the Great Mother. Did he not
know it in Hermione. Hermione