III

course. Michaelis was flattered by being asked up to Lady Chatterley’s own parlour. He followed blindly after the servant⁠ ⁠… he never noticed things, or had contact with his surroundings. In her room he did glance vaguely round at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and Cézanne.

“It’s very pleasant up here,” he said, with his queer smile, as if it hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. “You are wise to get to the top.”

“Yes, I think so,” she said.

Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never seen it, and she asked very few people up.

Now she and Michaelis sat on opposite sides of the fire and talked. She asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers⁠ ⁠… other people were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked frankly about himself, quite frankly, without affectation, simply revealing his bitter, indifferent, stray-dog’s soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful pride in his success.

“But why are you such a lonely bird?” Connie asked him; and again he looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look.

“Some birds are that way,” he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar irony; “but, look here, what about yourself? Aren’t you by way of being a lonely bird yourself?” Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few moments, and then she said: “Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!”

“Am I altogether a lonely bird?” he asked, with his queer grin of a smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned, or afraid.