Women in Love | Page 2

pause. 'But do
you hope to get anywhere by just marrying?'
'It seems to be the inevitable next step,' said Gudrun. Ursula pondered
this, with a little bitterness. She was a class mistress herself, in Willey
Green Grammar School, as she had been for some years.
'I know,' she said, 'it seems like that when one thinks in the abstract.
But really imagine it: imagine any man one knows, imagine him
coming home to one every evening, and saying "Hello," and giving one
a kiss--'
There was a blank pause.
'Yes,' said Gudrun, in a narrowed voice. 'It's just impossible. The man
makes it impossible.'
'Of course there's children--' said Ursula doubtfully.
Gudrun's face hardened.
'Do you REALLY want children, Ursula?' she asked coldly. A dazzled,
baffled look came on Ursula's face.
'One feels it is still beyond one,' she said.

'DO you feel like that?' asked Gudrun. 'I get no feeling whatever from
the thought of bearing children.'
Gudrun looked at Ursula with a masklike, expressionless face. Ursula
knitted her brows.
'Perhaps it isn't genuine,' she faltered. 'Perhaps one doesn't really want
them, in one's soul--only superficially.' A hardness came over Gudrun's
face. She did not want to be too definite.
'When one thinks of other people's children--' said Ursula.
Again Gudrun looked at her sister, almost hostile.
'Exactly,' she said, to close the conversation.
The two sisters worked on in silence, Ursula having always that strange
brightness of an essential flame that is caught, meshed, contravened.
She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from
day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in
her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but
underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she
could break through the last integuments! She seemed to try and put her
hands out, like an infant in the womb, and she could not, not yet. Still
she had a strange prescience, an intimation of something yet to come.
She laid down her work and looked at her sister. She thought Gudrun
so CHARMING, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine,
exquisite richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain
playfulness about her too, such a piquancy or ironic suggestion, such an
untouched reserve. Ursula admired her with all her soul.
'Why did you come home, Prune?' she asked.
Gudrun knew she was being admired. She sat back from her drawing
and looked at Ursula, from under her finely-curved lashes.
'Why did I come back, Ursula?' she repeated. 'I have asked myself a

thousand times.'
'And don't you know?'
'Yes, I think I do. I think my coming back home was just RECULER
POUR MIEUX SAUTER.'
And she looked with a long, slow look of knowledge at Ursula.
'I know!' cried Ursula, looking slightly dazzled and falsified, and as if
she did NOT know. 'But where can one jump to?'
'Oh, it doesn't matter,' said Gudrun, somewhat superbly. 'If one jumps
over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.'
'But isn't it very risky?' asked Ursula.
A slow mocking smile dawned on Gudrun's face.
'Ah!' she said laughing. 'What is it all but words!' And so again she
closed the conversation. But Ursula was still brooding.
'And how do you find home, now you have come back to it?' she asked.
Gudrun paused for some moments, coldly, before answering. Then, in a
cold truthful voice, she said:
'I find myself completely out of it.'
'And father?'
Gudrun looked at Ursula, almost with resentment, as if brought to bay.
'I haven't thought about him: I've refrained,' she said coldly.
'Yes,' wavered Ursula; and the conversation was really at an end. The
sisters found themselves confronted by a void, a terrifying chasm, as if
they had looked over the edge.

They worked on in silence for some time, Gudrun's cheek was flushed
with repressed emotion. She resented its having been called into being.
'Shall we go out and look at that wedding?' she asked at length, in a
voice that was too casual.
'Yes!' cried Ursula, too eagerly, throwing aside her sewing and leaping
up, as if to escape something, thus betraying the tension of the situation
and causing a friction of dislike to go over Gudrun's nerves.
As she went upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of her home
round about her. And she loathed it, the sordid, too-familiar place! She
was afraid at the depth of her feeling against the home, the milieu, the
whole atmosphere and condition of this obsolete life. Her feeling
frightened her.
The two girls were soon walking swiftly down the main road of
Beldover, a wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly
formless and sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life