"What has your life been, so far?"
"Oh—finding out things for myself—and getting experiences—and making things go."
Birkin knitted his brows like sharply moulded steel.
"I find," he said, "that one needs some one really pure, single activity—I should call love a single, pure activity. But I don't really love anybody—not now."
"Have you ever really loved anybody?" asked Gerald.
"Yes and no," replied Birkin.
"Not finally?" said Gerald.
"Finally—finally—no," said Birkin.
"Nor I," said Gerald.
"And do you want to?" said Birkin.
Gerald looked with a long, twinkling, almost sardonic look into the eyes of the other man.
"I don't know," he said.
"I do—I want to love," said Birkin.
"You do?"
"Yes. I want the finality of love."
"The finality of love," repeated Gerald. And he waited for a moment.
"Just one woman," he added. The evening light, flooding yellow along the fields, lit up Birkin's face with a tense, abstract steadfastness. Gerald still could not make it out.
"Yes, one woman," said Birkin.
But to Gerald it sounded as if he were insistent rather than confident.
"I don't believe a woman, and nothing but a woman, will ever make my life," said Gerald.
"Not the centre and core of it—the love between you and a woman?" asked Birkin.
Gerald's eyes narrowed with a queer dangerous smile as he watched the other man.
"I never quite feel it that way," he said.
"You don't? Then wherein does life centre, for you?"
"I don't know—that's what I want somebody to tell me. As far as I can make out, it doesn't centre at all. It is artificially held together by the social mechanism."
Birkin pondered as if he would crack something.
