She hesitated a moment before answering, opposing his persistence.
'Because I didn't like the crowd,' she replied.
He laughed, her phrase seemed to re-echo in his consciousness. The
flavour of her slang was piquant to him. Whether he would or not, she
signified the real world to him. He wanted to come up to her standards,
fulfil her expectations. He knew that her criterion was the only one
that mattered. The others were all outsiders, instinctively, whatever
they might be socially. And Gerald could not help it, he was bound to
strive to come up to her criterion, fulfil her idea of a man and a
human-being.
After lunch, when all the others had withdrawn, Hermione and Gerald and
Birkin lingered, finishing their talk. There had been some discussion,
on the whole quite intellectual and artificial, about a new state, a
new world of man. Supposing this old social state WERE broken and
destroyed, then, out of the chaos, what then?
The great social idea, said Sir Joshua, was the SOCIAL equality of man.
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