"Lawrence, D. H - Lady Chatterley's Lover" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lawrence D. H)

hair and sturdy body, and slow movements, full of unusual energy. She
had big, wondering eyes, and a soft mild voice, and seemed just to have
come from her native village. It was not so at all. Her father was the
once well-known R. A., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of
the cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days.
Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda
had had what might be called an aesthetically unconventional
upbringing. They had been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to
breathe in art, and they had been taken also in the other direction, to
the Hague and Berlin, to great Socialist conventions, where the
speakers spoke in every civilized tongue, and no one was abashed.

The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least daunted
by either art or ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They
were at once cosmopolitan and provincial, with the cosmopolitan
provincialism of art that goes with pure social ideals.

They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among
other things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely
among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical,
sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men
themselves only better, since they were women. And they tramped off to
the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang
the Wandervogel songs, and they were free. Free! That was the great
word. Out in the open world, out in the forests of the morning, with
lusty and splendid-throated young fellows, free to do as they liked,
and--above all--to say what they liked. It was the talk that mattered
supremely the impassioned interchange of talk. Love was only a minor
accompaniment.

Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love-affairs by the
time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so
passionately and sang so lustily and camped under the trees in such
freedom wanted, of course, the love connexion. The girls were doubtful,
but then the thing was so much talked about, it was supposed to be so
important. And the men were so humble and craving. Why couldn't a girl
be queenly, and give the gift of herself

So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom
she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the
discussions were the great thing the love-making and connexion were
only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax. One was
less in love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to hate
him, as if he had trespassed on one's privacy and inner freedom. For,
of course, being a girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life
consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and
noble freedom. What else did a girl's life mean To shake off the old
and sordid connexions and subjections.