r ever. Indeed, it was true as they said, that
a man wasn't born before he was married. What a change
indeed!

He surveyed the rind of the world: houses, factories, trams,
the discarded rind; people scurrying about, work going on, all
on the discarded surface. An earthquake had burst it all from
inside. It was as if the surface of the world had been broken
away entire: Ilkeston, streets, church, people, work,
rule-of-the-day, all intact; and yet peeled away into unreality,
leaving here exposed the inside, the reality: one's own being,
strange feelings and passions and yearnings and beliefs and
aspirations, suddenly become present, revealed, the permanent
bedrock, knitted one rock with the woman one loved. It was
confounding. Things are not what they seem! When he was a child,
he had thought a woman was a woman merely by virtue of her
skirts and petticoats. And now, lo, the whole world could be
divested of its garment, the garment could lie there shed away
intact, and one could stand in a new world, a new earth, naked
in a new, naked universe. It was too astounding and
miraculous.

This then was marriage! The old things didn't matter any
more. One got up at four o'clock, and had broth at tea-time and
made toffee in the middle of the night. One didn't put on one's
clothes or one did put on one's clothes. He still was not quite
sure it was not criminal. But it was a discovery to find one
might be so supremely absolved. All that mattered was that he
should love her and she should love him and they should live
kindled to one another, like the Lord in two burning bushes that
were not consumed. And so they lived for the time.

She was less hampered than he, so she came more quickly to
her fulness, and was sooner ready to enjoy again a return to the
outside world. She was going to give a tea-party. His heart
sank. He wanted to go on, to go on as they were. He wanted to
have done with the outside world, to declare it finished for
ever. He was anxious with a deep desire and anxiety that she
should stay with him where they were in the timeless universe of
free, perfect limbs and immortal breast, affirming that the old
outward order was finished. The new order was begun to last for
ever, the living life, palpitating from the gleaming core, to
action, without crust or cover or outward lie. But no, he could
not keep her. She wanted the dead world again-she wanted to walk
on the outside once more. She was going to give a tea-pa