Women in Love - Rather, Men in Love

Gerald Crich and Rupert Berkin have an interesting, slightly heated and
somewhat humorous conversation which rapidly transforms from
individuality versus herd mentality to some curious logical reasoning
on Berkin's part and culminates in the novel's first overt inclination
towards some sort of platonic homosexual love.

Gerald begins:

'Then I'm afraid I can't come up to your expectations here, at any
rate. You think people should just do as they like.'

'I think they always do. But I should like them to like the purely
individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. And
they only like to do the collective thing.'

'And I,' said Gerald grimly, 'shouldn't like to be in a world of people
who acted individually and spontaneously, as you call it. We should
have everybody cutting everybody else's throat in five minutes.'

'That means YOU would like to be cutting everybody's throat,' said
Birkin.

'How does that follow?' asked Gerald crossly.

'No man,' said Birkin, 'cuts another man's throat unless he wants to
cut it, and unless the other man wants it cutting. This is a complete
truth. It takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee.
And a murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is murderable
is a man who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered.'

'Sometimes you talk pure nonsense,' said Gerald to Birkin. 'As a matter
of fact, none of us wants our throat cut, and most other people would
like to cut it for us--some time or other--'

'It's a nasty view of things, Gerald,' said Birkin, 'and no wonder you
are afraid of yourself and your own unhappiness.'

'How am I afraid of myself?' said Gerald; 'and I don't think I am
unhappy.'

'You seem to have a lurking desire to have your gizzard slit, and
imagine every man has his knife up his sleeve for you,' Birkin said.

'How do you make that out?' said Gerald.

'From you,' said Birkin.

There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very
near to love. It was always the same between them; always their talk
brought them into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous
intimacy which was either hate or love, or both. They parted with
apparent unconcern, as if their going apart were a trivial occurrence.
And they really kept it to the level of trivial occurrence. Yet the
heart of each burned from the other. They burned with each other,
inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their
relationship a casual free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to
be so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart-burning between them.
They had not the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and
men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful
but suppressed friendliness. - pp.26-27