And he waited for a moment.
'Just one woman ?' he added.

The evening light, flooding yellow along the fields, lit up Birkin's face with a tense, abstract steadfastness.
Gerald still could not make it out.
'Yes, one woman,' said Birkin.
But to Gerald it sounded as if he were insistent rather than confident.
'I don't believe a woman, and nothing but a woman, will ever make my life,' said Gerald.
'Not the centre and core of it--the love between you and a woman ?' asked Birkin.
Gerald's eyes narrowed with a queer dangerous smile as he watched the other man.
'I never quite feel it that way,' he said.
'You don't?
Then wherein does life centre, for you ?' 'I don't know--that's what I want somebody to tell me.

As far as I can make out, it doesn't centre at all.

It is artificially held TOGETHER by the social mechanism.' Birkin pondered as if he would crack something.
'I know,' he said, 'it just doesn't centre.

The old ideals are dead as nails--nothing there.