about everything I talked to her: but everything. We talked ourselves into Persepolis and Timbuktu. We were the most literary-cultured couple in ten counties. I held forth with rapture to her, positively with rapture. I simply went up in smoke. And she adored me. The serpent in the grass was sex. She somehow didn’t have any; at least, not where it’s supposed to be. I got thinner and crazier. Then I said we’d got to be lovers. I talked her into it, as usual. So she let me. I was excited, and she never wanted it. She just didn’t want it. She adored me, she loved me to talk to her and kiss her: in that way she had a passion for me. But the other, she just didn’t want. And there are lots of women like her. And it was just the other that I did want. So there we split. I was cruel, and left her. Then I took on with another girl, a teacher, who had made a scandal by carrying on with a married man and driving him nearly out of his mind. She was a soft, white-skinned, soft sort of a woman, older than me, and played the fiddle. And she was a demon. She loved everything about love, except the sex. Clinging, caressing, creeping into you in every way: but if you forced her to the sex itself, she just ground her teeth and sent out hate. I forced her to it, and she could simply numb me with hate because of it. So I was balked again. I loathed all that. I wanted a woman who wanted me, and wanted it .
“Luego vino Bertha Coutts. Habían vivido al lado de nuestra casa cuando yo era un crío, así que la conocía perfectamente. Y eran de clase baja. Bueno, Bertha se fue a algún sitio en Birmingham; decía que de dama de compañía; todos los demás decían que de camarera o algo así en un hotel. En fin, justo cuando estaba más que harto de aquella otra chica, cuando tenía veintiún años, vuelve Bertha, con aires y ínfulas, ropa elegante y una especie de lozanía: una especie de lozanía sensual que a veces se ve en una mujer o en una yegua. Bueno, yo estaba que mordía. Dejé el trabajo en Butterley porque pensaba que era un panoli haciendo de Oficinista allí, y entré de herrero jefe en Tevershall, herrando caballos principalmente. Había sido el trabajo de mi padre, y siempre había estado con él. Era un trabajo que me gustaba: tratar con caballos, y me salía de forma natural. Así que dejé de hablar «fino», como lo llaman, de hablar