“Supreme pleasure?” she said, looking up at him. “Is that sort of idiocy the supreme pleasure of the life of the mind? No thank you! Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. But so many people, like your famous wind-machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses.”
He looked at her in wonder.
“The life of the body,” he said, “is just the life of the animals.”
“And that’s better than the life of professional corpses. But it’s not true! The human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming really to life, it is really rising from the tomb. And it will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of the human body.”
“My dear, you speak as if you were ushering it all in! True, you are going away on a holiday: but don’t please be quite so indecently elated about it. Believe me, whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.”
“Why should I believe you, Clifford, when I feel that whatever God there is has at last wakened up in my guts, as you call them, and is rippling so happily there, like dawn. Why should I believe you, when I feel so very much the contrary?”
“Oh, exactly! And what has caused this extraordinary change in you? Running out stark naked in the rain, and playing Bacchante? Desire for sensation, or the anticipation of going to Venice?”
“Both! Do you think it is horrid of me to be so thrilled at going off?” she said.