t WANT a world same as your brothers-in-law. It's just the special
quality you value. Do you WANT to be normal or ordinary! It's a lie.
You want to be free and extraordinary, in an extraordinary world of
liberty.'

Gerald looked at Birkin with subtle eyes of knowledge. But he would
never openly admit what he felt. He knew more than Birkin, in one
direction--much more. And this gave him his gentle love for the other
man, as if Birkin were in some way young, innocent, child-like: so
amazingly clever, but incurably innocent.

'Yet you are so banal as to consider me chiefly a freak,' said Birkin
pointedly.

'A freak!' exclaimed Gerald, startled. And his face opened suddenly, as
if lighted with simplicity, as when a flower opens out of the cunning
bud. 'No--I never consider you a freak.' And he watched the other man
with strange eyes, that Birkin could not understand. 'I feel,' Gerald
continued, 'that there is always an element of uncertainty about
you--perhaps you are uncertain about yourself. But I'm never sure of
you. You can go away and change as easily as if you had no soul.'

He looked at Birkin with penetrating eyes. Birkin was amazed. He
thought he had all the soul in the world. He stared in amazement. And
Gerald, watching, saw the amazing attractive goodliness of his eyes, a
young, spontaneous goodness that attracted the other man infinitely,
yet filled him with bitter chagrin, because he mistrusted it so much.
He knew Birkin could do without him--could forget, and not suffer. This
was always present in Gerald's consciousness, filling him with bitter
unbelief: this consciousness of the young, animal-like spontaneity of
detachment. It seemed almost like hypocrisy and lying, sometimes, oh,
often, on Birkin's part, to talk so deeply and importantly.

Quite other things were going through Birkin's mind. Suddenly he saw
himself confronted with another problem--the problem of love and
eternal conjunction between two men. Of course this was necessary--it
had been a necessity inside himself all his life--to love a man purely
and fully. Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along
denying it.

He lay in the bed and wondered, whilst his friend sat beside him, lost
in brooding. Each man was gone in his own thoughts.

'You know how the old German knights used to swear a BLUTBRUDERSCHAFT,'
he said to Gerald, with quite a new happy activity in his eyes.

'Make a little wound in their arms, and rub each ot