It may seem to you Clifford doesn't count, but he does. When you think how disabled he is. . ."
"Oh damn it all! if a fellow's going to trade on his disabilities, I might begin to say how lonely I am, and always have been, and all the rest of the my-eye-Betty-Martin sob-stuff! Damn it all, if a fellow's got nothing but disabilities to recommend him. . ."
He turned aside, working his hands furiously in his trousers pockets. That evening he said to her:
"You're coming round to my room tonight, aren't you? I don't darned know where your room is."
"All right!" she said.
He was a more excited lover that night, with his strange, small boy's frail nakedness. Connie found it impossible to come to her crisis before he had really finished his. And he roused a certain craving passion in her, with his little boy's nakedness and softness; she had to go on after he had finished, in the wild tumult and heaving of her loins, while he heroically kept himself up, and present in her, with all his will and self-offering, till she brought about her own crisis, with weird little cries.
When at last he drew away from her, he said, in a bitter, almost sneering little voice:
"You couldn't go off at the same time as a man, could you? You'd have to bring yourself off! You'd have to run the show!"
This little speech, at the moment, was one of the shocks of her life. Because that passive sort of giving himself was so obviously his only real mode of intercourse.
"What do you mean?" she said.
"You know what I mean. You keep on for hours after I've gone off. . . and I have to hang on with my teeth till you bring yourself off by your own exertions."
She was stunned by this unexpected piece of brutality, at the moment when she was glowing with a sort of pleasure beyond words, and a sort of love for him. Because after all, like so many modern men, he was finished almost before he had begun. And that forced the woman to be active.
"But you want me to go on, to get my own satisfaction?" she said.
He laughed grimly: "I want it!" he said. "That's good! I want to hang on with my teeth clenched, while you go for me!"
