Only the opal, with its thin wire loop, would go on her ring finger. And she was superstitious. No, there was ill-portent enough, she would not accept this ring from him in pledge.
“Look,” she said, putting forward her hand, that was half-closed and shrinking. “The others don’t fit me.”
He looked at the red-glinting, soft stone, on her oversensitive skin.
“Yes,” he said.
“But opals are unlucky, aren’t they?” she said wistfully.
“No. I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don’t.”
“But why?” she laughed.
And, consumed with a desire to see how the other rings would look on her hand, she put them on her little finger.
“They can be made a little bigger,” he said.
“Yes,” she replied, doubtfully. And she sighed. She knew that, in accepting the rings, she was accepting a pledge. Yet fate seemed more than herself. She looked again at the jewels. They were very beautiful to her eyes—not as ornament, or wealth, but as tiny fragments of loveliness.
“I’m glad you bought them,” she said, putting her hand, half unwillingly, gently on his arm.
He smiled, slightly. He wanted her to come to him. But he was angry at the bottom of his soul, and indifferent. He knew she had a passion for him, really. But it was not finally interesting. There were depths of passion when one became impersonal and indifferent, unemotional. Whereas Ursula was still at the emotional personal level—always so abominably personal. He had taken her as he had never been taken himself. He had taken her at the roots of her darkness and shame—like a demon, laughing over the fountain of mystic corruption which was one of the sources of her being, laughing, shrugging, accepting, accepting finally. As for her, when would she so much go beyond herself as to accept him at the quick of death?
She now became quite happy. The motorcar ran on, the afternoon was soft and dim. She talked with lively interest, analysing people and their motives—Gudrun, Gerald. He answered vaguely. He was not very much interested any more in personalities and in people—people were all different, but they were all enclosed nowadays in a definite limitation, he said; there were only about two great ideas, two great streams of activity remaining, with various forms of reaction therefrom. The reactions were all varied in various people, but they followed a few great laws, and intrinsically there was no difference. They acted and reacted involuntarily according to a few great laws, and once the laws, the great principles, were known, people were no longer mystically interesting. They were all essentially alike, the differences were only variations on a theme. None of them transcended the given terms.
Ursula did not agree—people were still an adventure to her—but—perhaps not as much as she tried to persuade herself. Perhaps there was something mechanical, now, in her interest. Perhaps also her interest was destructive, her analysing was a real tearing to pieces. There was an under-space in her where she did not care for people and their idiosyncracies, even to destroy them. She seemed to touch for a moment this undersilence in herself, she became still, and she turned for a moment purely to Birkin.
“Won’t it be lovely to go home in the dark?” she said. “We might have tea rather late—shall we?—and have high tea? Wouldn’t that be rather nice?”
“I promised to be at Shortlands for dinner,” he said.
“But—it doesn’t matter—you can go tomorrow—”
“Hermione is there,” he said, in rather an uneasy voice. “She is going away in two days. I suppose I ought to say goodbye to her. I shall never see her again.”
Ursula drew away, closed in a violent silence. He knitted his brows, and his eyes began to sparkle again in anger.
“You don’t mind, do you?” he asked irritably.
“No, I don’t care. Why should I? Why should I mind?” Her tone was jeering and offensive.
“That’s what I ask myself,” he said; “why should you mind! But you seem to.” His brows were tense with violent irritation.
“I assure you I don’t, I don’t mind in the least. Go where you belong—it’s what I want you to do.”
“Ah you fool!” he cried, “with your ‘go where you belong.’ It’s finished between Hermione and me. She means much more to you, if it comes to that, than she does to me. For you can only revolt in pure reaction from her—and to be her opposite is to be her counterpart.”
“Ah, opposite!” cried Ursula. “I know your dodges. I am not taken in by your word-twisting. You belong to Hermione and her dead show. Well, if you do, you do. I don’t blame you. But then you’ve nothing to do with me.”
In his inflamed, overwrought exasperation, he stopped the car, and they sat there, in the middle of the country lane, to have it out. It was a crisis of war between them, so they did not see the ridiculousness of their situation.
“If you weren’t a fool, if only you weren’t a fool,” he cried in bitter despair, “you’d see that one could be decent, even when one has been wrong. I was wrong to go on all those years with Hermione—it was a deathly process. But after all, one can have a little human decency. But no, you would tear my soul out with your jealousy at the very mention of Hermione’s name.”
“I jealous! I—jealous! You are mistaken if you think that. I’m not jealous in the least of Hermione, she is nothing to me, not that!” And Ursula snapped her fingers. “No, it’s you who are a liar. It’s you who must
