'Yes. It seems to me he’s mistaken there too,' said Gudrun. 'I’m sure a mistress is more likely to be faithful than a wife—just because she is her own mistress. No—he says he believes that a man and wife can go further than any other two beings—but where, is not explained. They can know each other, heavenly and hellish, but particularly hellish, so perfectly that they go beyond heaven and hell—into—there it all breaks down—into nowhere.'
'Into Paradise, he says,' laughed Gerald.
Gudrun shrugged her shoulders. 'Fe m’en fiche of your Paradise!' she said.
'Not being a Mohammedan,' said Gerald. Birkin sat motionless, driving the car, quite unconscious of what they said. And Gudrun, sitting immediately behind him, felt a sort of ironic pleasure in thus exposing him.
'He says,' she added, with a grimace of irony, 'that you can find an eternal equilibrium in marriage, if you accept the unison, and still leave yourself separate, don’t try to fuse.'
'Doesn’t inspire me,' said Gerald.
'That’s just it,' said Gudrun.
'I believe in love, in a real abandon, if you’re capable of it,' said Gerald.
'So do I,' said she.
'And so does Rupert, too—though he is always shouting.'
'No,' said Gudrun. 'He won’t abandon himself to the other person. You can’t be sure of him. That’s the trouble I think.'
'Yet he wants marriage! Marriage—et puis?'
'Le paradis!' mocked Gudrun.
Birkin, as he drove, felt a creeping of the spine, as if somebody was threatening his neck. But he shrugged with indifference. It began to rain. Here was a change. He stopped the car and got down to put up the hood.
