not interested in your peccadilloes.’

‘And I don’t care whether you are or not — I am.’

The morning was again sunny. The maid had been in and brought the water, and had drawn the curtains. Birkin, sitting up in bed, looked lazily and pleasantly out on the park, that was so green and deserted, romantic, belonging to the past. He was thinking how lovely, how sure, how formed, how final all the things of the past were — the lovely accomplished past — this house, so still and golden, the park slumbering its centuries of peace. And then, what a snare and a delusion, this beauty of static things — what a horrible, dead prison Breadalby really was, what an intolerable confinement, the peace! Yet it was better than the sordid scrambling conflict of