`As you like.'
Mellors slung into his coat, looked at Connie, saluted, and was gone. Connie, furious, went upstairs.
At lunch she could not contain her feeling.
`Why are you so abominably inconsiderate, Clifford?' she said to him.
`Of whom?'
`Of the keeper! If that is what you call ruling classes, I'm sorry for you.'
`Why?'
`A man who's been ill, and isn't strong! My word, if I were the serving classes, I'd let you wait for service. I'd let you whistle.'
`I quite believe it.'
`If he'd been sitting in a chair with paralysed legs, and behaved as you behaved, what would you have done for him?'
`My dear evangelist, this confusing of persons and personalities is in bad taste.'
`And your nasty, sterile want of common sympathy is in the worst taste imaginable. Noblesse oblige! You and your ruling class!'
`And to what should it oblige me? To have a lot of unnecessary emotions about my game-keeper? I refuse. I leave it all to my evangelist.'
`As if he weren't a man as much as you are, my word!'
`My game-keeper to boot, and I pay him two pounds a week and give him a house.'
`Pay him! What do you think you pay for, with two pounds a week and a house?'
`His services.'
`Bah! I would tell you to keep your two pounds a week and your house.'
`Probably he would like to: but can't afford the luxury!'
`You, and rule!' she said. `You don't rule, don't flatter yourself. You have only got more than your share of the money, and make people work for you for two pounds a week, or threaten them with starvation. Rule! What do you give forth of rule? Why, you re dried up! You only bully with your money, like any Jew or any Schieber!'
`You are very elegant in your speech, Lady Chatterley!'
`I assure you, you were very elegant altogether out there in the wood. I was utterly ashamed of you. Why, my father is ten times the human being you are: you gentleman!'
He reached and rang the bell for Mrs Bolton. But he was yellow at the gills.
She went up to her room, furious, saying to herself: `Him and buying people! Well, he doesn't buy me, and therefore there's no need for me to stay with him. Dead fish of a gentleman, with his celluloid soul!