He would say during the daytime: "To-night I shall know the little hollow under her ankle,
where the blue vein crosses." And the thought of it, and the
desire for it, made a thick darkness of anticipation.
He would go all the day waiting for the night to come, when
he could give himself to the enjoyment of some luxurious
absolute of beauty in her. The thought of the hidden resources
of her, the undiscovered beauties and ecstatic places of delight
in her body, waiting, only waiting for him to discover them,
sent him slightly insane. He was obsessed. If he did not
discover and make known to himself these delights, they might be
lost for ever. He wished he had a hundred men's energies, with
which to enjoy her. [He wished he were a cat, to lick her with a
rough, grating, lascivious tongue. He wanted to wallow in her,
bury himself in her flesh, cover himself over with her flesh.] And she, separate, with a strange, dangerous, glistening look
in her eyes received all his activities upon her as if they were
expected by her, and provoked him when he was quiet to more,
till sometimes he was ready to perish for sheer inability to be
satisfied of her, inability to have had enough of her.
Their children became mere offspring to them, they lived in
the darkness and death of their own sensual activities.
Sometimes he felt he was going mad with a sense of Absolute
Beauty, perceived by him in her through his senses. It was
something too much for him. And in everything, was this same,
almost sinister, terrifying beauty. But in the revelations of
her body through contact with his body, was the ultimate beauty,
to know which was almost death in itself, and yet for the
knowledge of which he would have undergone endless torture. He
would have forfeited anything, anything, rather than forego his
right even to the instep of her foot, and the place from which
the toes radiated out, the little, miraculous white plain from
which ran the little hillocks of the toes, and the folded,
dimpling hollows between the toes. He felt he would have died
rather than forfeit this.
This was what their love had become, a sensuality violent and
extreme as death. They had no conscious intimacy, no tenderness
of love. It was all the lust and the infinite, maddening
intoxication of the sense, a passion of death.
He had always, all his life, had a secret dread of Absolute
Beauty. It had always been like a fetish to him, something to
fear, really. For it was immoral and against mankind. So he had
turned to the Gothic form, which always asserted the broken
desire of mankind in its pointed arches, escaping the rolling,
absolute beauty of the round arch.