- It's time for Connie's trip to Venice.
- Clifford still isn't happy about losing the best—well, only—audience for his insane plans to convert his mines into oil or electricity. Mrs. Bolton is a pretty good companion, though, and the two of them gamble together all night.
- Connie is pissed about this. She thinks it's pretty low of Clifford to take money from his employee, and we have to say she sounds right about that.
- Mellors and Connie are making half-hearted plans to be together. Connie's the one pushing marriage. Mellors doesn't seem to care much either way (that's usually a warning sign, Connie), but he goes along with her plans for divorce.
- One rainy day, he tells Connie about his colonel, the army officer he served in the war.
- Mellors had a big ol'man-crush on him, which isn't surprising given that the two shared the same disdain for people. The middle classes go on "arse-licking till their tongues are tough" (15.55), while the working people are a "rabbit generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces" (15.60).
- Just in case we haven't already gotten the point about how much Mellors hates the modern world, he goes on about it some more. Like some prepper survivalist who can't wait for the zombie apocalypse, he seems to be looking forward to the world ending.
- At some point, Connie can't handle all this negativity and points out that it would kind of stink for the world to end if they had a child. Mellors isn't too excited about having a child in the modern world: "Bit by bit, let's drop the whole industrial life and go back. The least little bit o' money'll do. For everybody, me an' you, bosses an' masters, even th'king" (15.85).
- This is a nice pre-industrial fantasy, and he goes on with an insane scheme to build a bunch of common buildings and all live together in pagan harmony, with men in red pants, "buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jack: then the women 'ud begin to be women" (15.86). Okay, Mellors, you kind of lost us there.
- Connie is so stirred by this idyllic vision that she runs out naked into the rain, dancing around like a lunatic until Mellors finally comes out and has sex with her.
- Later, when they're lying on the floor in the cottage, he spends a lot of time admiring her butt and talking about poop. It's very romantic.
- But it's not nearly as romantic as what happens next: as Connie and Mellors make plans to spend another night together, they bedeck themselves in flowers like hippies on a bunch of Schedule I drugs. There are forget-me-knots in Connie's pubic hair and campions in Mellors's, and they have themselves a little pagan wedding of "Lady Jane[…] with John Thomas" (15.146).
- Finally Mellors escorts Connie home, only to run into …
- Mrs. Bolton.