T H E S I S

80
kiss. And he had to come in to her at once, to enter the
peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body. It was the moment
of pure peace for him, the entry into the body of the
woman.
She lay still, in a kind of sleep, always in a kind of
.sleep. The activity, the orgasm was his, all his, she could
strive for herself no more. Even the tightness of his arms
round her, even the intense movement of his body, and the
springing of his seed in her, was a kind of sleep, from
which she did not begin to rouse till he had finished and
lay softly panting against her breast,”(LCL 120)
Despite the sweet tenderness of the first contact and the
peace which is only possible through fulfilment, the vision is.
that of an unsatisfied female; “the orgasm was his, all his,”
Her sensations and her reasons are really unutterable. Later on
her erotic performance reaches a worse conditions
uAnd this time the sharp ecstasy of her own passion did
not overcome her; she lay with her hands inert on his striving
body, and do what she might, her spirit seemed to look
on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches
seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of
his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed
farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of
the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor, insignificant,
moist little penis. This was the divine love I After all,
the moderns were right when they felt contempt for the performance;
for it was a performance. It was quite true, as
some poets said, that the God who created man must have had
a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being,
yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving
him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.
Even a Maupassant found it a humiliating anti-climax. Men
despised the sexual intercourse, and yet did it.
Cold and derisive, her queer female mind stood apart,
and though she lay perfectly still, her impulse was to