RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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(p.252 - My underlining).
His answer is more stupid than hers:
"'Yes,' he said. 'I suppose I came to propose.1 He seemed to
fight shy of the last word" (p.253 - My underlining).
Birkin
again uses the past tense to say that he 'wanted' to ask Ursula
to marry him.
His uncertainty is clear in Birkin's lack of
care for Ursula's answer.
In fact, he is not expecting an
answer: "... whether she accepted it or not, he did not think
about it" (p.251)'and after the proposal "His eyes were flickering
with mixed lights, wanting something of her, yet not wanting it"
(p.253).
Ursula's answer reflects her rejection: Birkin and her
father are bullies. Birkin goes away after this fiasco. He is
not, however, very much worried about Ursula's rejection.
His
remedy is once more to go to Gerald.
He is Birkin's next
'victim'.
What is strange in Birkin's practice is that before
he goes to Ursula's home he has decided not to mix himself with
the 'destructive ice-knowledge' of Gerald.
Ursula is his only
escape.
She rejects him and he has simply forgotten his earlier
conflict and goes straight to Gerald.
The fourth and last scene occurs in the chapter
"Gladiatorial" in which Birkin goes to Gerald's home and finds
the moment opportune to ask his friend to wrestle with him in
the Japanese style he learned from an Eastern friend.
Gerald
and Birkin's preparation for the wrestling game has a mystic
atmosphere mixed with a feeling of lovers preparing to have
sexual intercourse.
When the wrestling reaches its apex, Gerald
seems to use his physical strength whereas Birkin is more mental
in his way of using his body.
It is a fight between two
different forces which in some way meet and mingle.
The point
here seems to be that Birkin refuses the 'meeting and mingling'
with a woman, but with a man he seems to lose control of his own