“The tall white lillies were reeling in the moonlight, and the air was charged with perfume, as with a presence. Mrs. Morel gasped slightly in fear. She touched the big, pallid flowers on their petals, then shivered. They seemed to be stretching in the moonlight. She put her hand into one white bin: the gold scarcely showed on her fingers by moonlight. She bent down to look at the binful of yellow pollen; but it only appeared dusky. The she drank a deep draught of the scent. It almost made her dizzy.”

“She looked at her roses. They were white, some incurved and holy, others expanded in an ecstacy. The tree was dark as a shadow. She lifted her hand impulsively to the flowers; she went forward and touched them in worship.”

“He felt that she wanted the soul out of his body and not him. All his strength and energy she drew into herself through some channel which united them. She did not want to meet him so that there were two of them man and woman together. She wanted to draw all of him into her. It urged him to an intensity like madness which fascinated him as drug-taking might. He was discussing Michael Angelo. It felt to her as if she were fingering the very quivering tissue the very protoplasm of life as she heard him. It gave her deepest satisfaction. And in the end it frightened her. There he lay in the white intensity of his search and his voice gradually filled her with fear so level it was almost inhuman as if in a trance.”

“It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it.”

“In the inner dark she saw a handsome bay horse with his clean earspricked like daggers from his naked head as he swung handsomely roundto stare at the open doorway. He had big, black, brilliant eyes, with asharp questioning glint, and that air of tense, alert quietness which betraysan animal that can be dangerous... He was of such a lovely red-goldcolour, and a dark, invisible fire seemed to come out of him .. .She looked at the glowing bay horse, that stood there with his ears back,his face averted, but attending as if he were some lightning conductor. Hewas a stallion . ..Dimly, in her weary young-woman's soul, an ancient understandingseemed to flood in . . . For some reason the sight of him, his power, his alive,alert intensity, his unyieldingness, made her want to cry. She never didcry ... But now, as if that mysterious fire of the horse's body had split somerock in her, she went home and hid herself in her room, and just cried. Thewild, brilliant, alert head of St Mawr seemed to look at her out of anotherworld. It was as if she had had a vision, as if the walls of her own world hadsuddenly melted away, leaving her in a great darkness, in the midst of whichthe large, brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish question,while his naked ears stood up like daggers from the naked lines of hisinhuman head, and his great body glowed red with power.What was it? Almost like a god looking at her terribly out of theeverlasting dark, she had felt the eyes of that horse; great, glowing,fearsome eyes, arched with a question, and containing a white blade oflight like a threat. What was his non-human question, and his uncannythreat? She didn't know. He was some splendid demon, and she mustworship him. (St Mawr)”

“With Mrs. Morel it was one of those still moments when the small frets vanish, and the beauty of things stands out, and she had the peace and the strength to see herself.”

“The day was gone, the twilight was gone, and the snow was invisible as I came down to the side of the lake. Only the moon, white and shining, was in the sky, like a woman glorying in her own loveliness as she loiters superbly to the gaze of all the world, looking sometimes through the fringe of dark olive leaves, sometimes looking at her own superb, quivering body, wholly naked in the water of the lake.”