He was speaking as if in a trance, verbal and blank. Then suddenly he braced himself up with a kind of rhapsody, and looked at Birkin with vindictive, cowed eyes, saying:

‘Do you know what it is to suffer when you are with a woman? She’s so beautiful, so perfect, you find her SO GOOD, it tears you like a silk, and every stroke and bit cuts hot — ha, that perfection, when you blast yourself, you blast yourself! And then — ’ he stopped on the snow and suddenly opened his clenched hands — ’it’s nothing — your brain might have gone charred as rags — and — ’ he looked round into the air with a queer histrionic movement ‘it’s blasting — you understand what I mean — it is a great experience, something final — and then —