between
them, something strange and foreign and outside his life,
talking, rattling, without rhyme or reason, laughing when he was
shocked or astounded, condemning nothing, confounding his mind
and making the whole world a chaos, without order or stability
of any kind. Then, when they went to bed, he knew that he had
nothing to do with her. She was back in her childhood, he was a
peasant, a serf, a servant, a lover, a paramour, a shadow, a
nothing. He lay still in amazement, staring at the room he knew
so well, and wondering whether it was really there, the window,
the chest of drawers, or whether it was merely a figment in the
atmosphere. And gradually he grew into a raging fury against
her. But because he was so much amazed, and there was as yet
such a distance between them, and she was such an amazing thing
to him, with all wonder opening out behind her, he made no
retaliation on her. Only he lay still and wide-eyed with rage,
inarticulate, not understanding, but solid with hostility.

And he remained wrathful and distinct from her, unchanged
outwardly to her, but underneath a solid power of antagonism to
her. Of which she became gradually aware. And it irritated her
to be made aware of him as a separate power. She lapsed into a
sort of sombre exclusion, a curious communion with mysterious
powers, a sort of mystic, dark state which drove him and the
child nearly mad. He walked about for days stiffened with
resistance to her, stiff with a will to destroy her as she was.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, there was connection between them
again. It came on him as he was working in the fields. The
tension, the bond, burst, and the passionate flood broke forward
into a tremendous, magnificent rush, so that he felt he could
snap off the trees as he passed, and create the world
afresh.

And when he arrived home, there was no sign between them. He
waited and waited till she came. And as he waited, his limbs
seemed strong and splendid to him, his hands seemed like
passionate servants to him, goodly, he felt a stupendous power
in himself, of life, and of urgent, strong blood.

She was sure to come at last, and touch him. Then he burst
into flame for her, and lost himself. They looked at each other,
a deep laugh at the bottom of their eyes, and he went to take of
her again, wholesale, mad to revel in the inexhaustible wealth
of her, to bury himself in the depths of her in an inexhaustible
exploration, she all the while reve