`Ah no,' he answered, `not so.I believe in the proud angels and the demons that are our fore-runners.They will destroy us, because we are not proud enough.The ichthyosauri were not proud: they crawled and floundered as we do.And besides, look at elder-flowers and bluebells -- they are a sign that pure creation takes place -- even the butterfly.But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -- it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.'
Ursula watched him as he talked.There seemed a certain impatient fury in him, all the while, and at the same time a great amusement in everything, and a final tolerance.And it was this tolerance she mistrusted, not the fury.She saw that, all the while, in spite of himself, he would have to be trying to save the world.And this knowledge, whilst it comforted her heart somewhere with a little self-satisfaction, stability, yet filled her with a certain sharp contempt and hate of him.She wanted him to herself, she hated the Salvator Mundi touch.It was something diffuse and generalised about him, which she could not stand.He would behave in the same way, say the same things, give himself as completely to anybody who came along, anybody and everybody who liked to appeal to him.It was despicable, a very insidious form of prostitution.
`But,' she said, `you believe in individual love, even if you don't believe in loving humanity --?'
`I don't believe in love at all -- that is, any more than I believe in hate, or in grief.Love is one of the emotions like all the others --and so it is all right whilst you feel it But I can't see how it becomes an absolute.It is just part of human relationships, no more.And it is only part of any human relationship.And why one should be required always to feel it, any more than one always feels sorrow or distant joy, I cannot conceive.Love isn't a desideratum -- it is an emotion you feel or you don't feel, according to circumstance.'
`Then why do you care about people at all?' she asked, `if you don't believe in love? Why do you bother about humanity?'
`Why do I? Because I can't get away from it.'
`Because you love it,' she persisted.
It irritated him.
`If I do love it,' he said, `it is my disease.'
`But it is a disease you don't want to be cured of,' she said, with some cold sneering.
He was silent now, feeling she wanted to insult him.
`And if you don't believe in love, what do you believe in?' she asked mocking.`Simply in the end of the world, and grass?'
He was beginning to feel a fool.
`I believe in the unseen hosts,' he said.
`And nothing else? You believe in nothing visible, except grass and birds? Your world is a poor show.'
`Perhaps it is,' he said, cool and superior now he was offended, assuming a certain insufferable aloof superiority, and withdrawing into his distance.
Ursula disliked him.But also she felt she had lost something.She looked at him as he sat crouched on the bank.There was a certain priggish Sunday-school stiffness over him, priggish and detestable.And yet, at the same time, the moulding of him was so quick and attractive, it gave such a great sense of freedom: the moulding of his brows, his chin, his whole physique, something so alive, somewhere, in spite of the look of sickness.
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.
