“You’d wonder,” he said at last, “that such beings were ever allowed to be born.”
“What beings?” she asked.
He looked at her weirdly, without an answer. It was obvious he couldn’t even accept the fact of the existence of Mellors, in any connection with his own life. It was sheer, unspeakable, impotent hate.
“And do you mean to say you’d marry him?—and bear his foul name?” he asked at length.
“Yes, that’s what I want.”
He was again as if dumbfounded.
“Yes!” he said at last. “That proves that what I’ve always thought about you is correct: you’re not normal, you’re not in your right senses. You’re one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue.”
Suddenly he had become almost wistfully moral, seeing himself the incarnation of good, and people like Mellors and Connie the incarnation of mud, of evil. He seemed to be growing vague, inside a nimbus.
“So don’t you think you’d better divorce me and have done with it?” she said.
“No! You can go where you like, but I shan’t divorce you,” he said idiotically.
“Why not?”
He was silent, in the silence of imbecile obstinacy.
“Would you even let the child be legally yours, and your heir?” she said.