not. It is disgusting, people
marrying for a home.'

'Still,' said Ursula, 'a man has very little need for a woman now, has
he?'

'In outer things, maybe--except to share his bed and bear his children.
But essentially, there is just the same need as there ever was. Only
nobody takes the trouble to be essential.'

'How essential?' she said.

'I do think,' he said, 'that the world is only held together by the
mystic conjunction, the ultimate unison between people--a bond. And the
immediate bond is between man and woman.'

'But it's such old hat,' said Ursula. 'Why should love be a bond? No,
I'm not having any.'

'If you are walking westward,' he said, 'you forfeit the northern and
eastward and southern direction. If you admit a unison, you forfeit all
the possibilities of chaos.'

'But love is freedom,' she declared.

'Don't cant to me,' he replied. 'Love is a direction which excludes all
other directions. It's a freedom TOGETHER, if you like.'

'No,' she said, 'love includes everything.'

'Sentimental cant,' he replied. 'You want the state of chaos, that's
all. It is ultimate nihilism, this freedom-in-love business, this
freedom which is love and love which is freedom. As a matter of fact,
if you enter into a pure unison, it is irrevocable, and it is never
pure till it is irrevocable. And when it is irrevocable, it is one way,
like the path of a star.'

'Ha!' she cried bitterly. 'It is the old dead morality.'

'No,' he said, 'it is the law of creation. One is committed. One must
commit oneself to a conjunction with the other--for ever. But it is not
selfless--it is a maintaining of the self in mystic balance and
integrity--like a star balanced with another star.'

'I don't trust you when you drag in the stars,' she said. 'If you were
quite true, it wouldn't be necessary to be so far-fetched.'

'Don't trust me then,' he said, angry. 'It is enough that I trust
myself.'

'And that is where you make another mistake,' she replied. 'You DON'T
trust yourself. You don't fully believe yourself what you are saying.
You don't really want this conjunction, otherwise you wouldn't talk so
much about it, you'd get it.'

He was suspended for a moment, arrested.

'How?' he said.

'By just loving,' she retorted in defiance.

He was still a moment, in anger. Then he said:

'I tell you, I don't believe in love like that. I tell you, you want
love to administer to your egoism, to subserve you. Love is a process
o