Любовник леди Чаттерлей / Lady Chatterley's Lover

What’s the use of my generalizing? I only know my own case. I like women, but I don’t desire them. I like talking to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction, sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you are! But don’t take me as a general example, probably I’m just a special case: one of the men who like women, but don’t love women, and even hate them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance.

“But doesn’t it make you sad?”

“Why should it? Not a bit! I look at Charlie May, and the rest of the men who have affairs… No, I don’t envy them a bit! If fate sent me a woman I wanted, well and good.

Since I don’t know any woman I want, and never see one… why, I presume I’m cold, and really like some women very much.”

“Do you like me?”

“Very much! And you see there’s no question of kissing between us, is there?”

“None at all!” said Connie. “But oughtn’t there to be?”

“Why, in God’s name? I like Clifford, but what would you say if I went and kissed him?”

“But isn’t there a difference?”

“Where does it lie, as far as we’re concerned? We’re all intelligent human beings, and the male and female business is in abeyance.

Just in abeyance. How would you like me to start acting up like a continental[42 - Англичане называли «континентальной» культуру Западной Европы. ] male at this moment, and parading the sex thing?”

“I should hate it.”

“Well then! I tell you, if I’m really a male thing at all, I never run across the female of my species. And I don’t miss her, I just like women. Who’s going to force me into loving or pretending to love them, working up the sex game?”

“No, I’m not. But isn’t something wrong?”

“You may feel it, I don’t.”

“Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no glamour for a man any more.

”

“Has a man for a woman?”

She pondered the other side of the question.

“Not much,” she said truthfully.

“Then let’s leave it all alone, and just be decent and simple, like proper human beings with one another. Be damned to the artificial sex-compulsion! I refuse it!”

Connie knew he was right, really. Yet it left her feeling so forlorn, so forlorn and stray. Like a chip on a dreary pond, she felt.