Ursula pondered this for a time.
“I doubt it,” she replied. “Really she risks nothing. I suppose we ought to admire her for knowing she can invite us—school teachers—and risk nothing.”
“Precisely!” said Gudrun. “Think of the myriads of women that daren’t do it. She makes the most of her privileges—that’s something. I suppose, really, we should do the same, in her place.”
“No,” said Ursula. “No. It would bore me. I couldn’t spend my time playing her games. It’s infra dig.”
The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything that came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against the other.
“Of course,” cried Ursula suddenly, “she ought to thank her stars if we will go and see her. You are perfectly beautiful, a thousand times more beautiful than ever she is or was, and to my thinking, a thousand times more beautifully dressed, for she never looks fresh and natural, like a flower, always old, thought-out; and we are more intelligent than most people.”
“Undoubtedly!” said Gudrun.
“And it ought to be admitted, simply,” said Ursula.
“Certainly it ought,” said Gudrun. “But you’ll find that the really chic thing is to be so absolutely ordinary, so perfectly commonplace and like the person in the street, that you really are a masterpiece of humanity, not the person in the street actually, but the artistic creation of her—”
“How awful!” cried Ursula.
“Yes, Ursula, it is awful, in most respects. You daren’t be anything that isn’t amazingly à terre, so much à terre that it is the artistic creation of ordinariness.”
“It’s very dull to create oneself into nothing better,” laughed Ursula.
“Very dull!” retorted Gudrun. “Really Ursula, it is dull, that’s just the word. One longs to be high-flown, and make speeches like Corneille, after it.”
Gudrun was becoming flushed and excited over her own cleverness.
“Strut,” said Ursula. “One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese.”
“Exactly,” cried Gudrun, “a swan among geese.”
“They are all so busy playing the ugly duckling,” cried Ursula, with mocking laughter. “And I don’t feel a bit like a humble and pathetic ugly duckling. I do feel like a swan among geese—I can’t help it. They make one feel so. And I don’t care what they think of me. Je m’en fiche.”
Gudrun looked up at Ursula with a queer, uncertain envy and dislike.
“Of course, the only thing to do is to despise them all—just all,” she said.
The sisters went home again, to read and talk and work, and wait for Monday, for school. Ursula often wondered what else she waited for, besides the beginning and end of the school week, and the beginning and end of the holidays. This was a whole life! Sometimes she had periods of tight horror, when it seemed to her that her life would pass away, and be gone, without having been more than this. But she never really accepted it. Her spirit was active, her life like a shoot that is growing steadily, but which has not yet come above ground.
V
In the Train
One day at this time Birkin was called to London. He was not very fixed in his abode. He had rooms in Nottingham, because his work lay chiefly in that town. But often he was in London, or in Oxford. He moved about a great deal, his life seemed uncertain, without any definite rhythm, any organic meaning.
On the platform of the railway station he saw Gerald Crich, reading a newspaper, and evidently waiting for the train. Birkin stood some distance off, among the people. It was against his instinct to approach anybody.
From time to time, in a manner characteristic of him, Gerald lifted his head and looked round. Even though he was reading the newspaper closely, he must keep a watchful eye on his external surroundings. There seemed to be a dual consciousness running in him. He was thinking vigorously of something he read in the newspaper, and at the same time his eye ran over the surfaces of the life round him, and he missed nothing. Birkin, who was watching him, was irritated by his duality. He noticed too, that Gerald seemed always to be at bay against everybody, in spite of his queer, genial, social manner when roused.
Now Birkin started violently at seeing this genial look flash on to Gerald’s face, at seeing Gerald approaching with hand outstretched.
“Hallo, Rupert, where are you going?”
“London. So are you, I suppose.”
“Yes—”
Gerald’s eyes went over Birkin’s face in curiosity.
“We’ll travel together if you like,” he said.
“Don’t you usually go first?” asked Birkin.
“I can’t stand the crowd,” replied Gerald. “But third’ll be all right. There’s a restaurant car, we can have some tea.”
The two men looked at the station clock, having nothing further to say.
“What were you reading in the paper?” Birkin asked.
Gerald looked at him quickly.
“Isn’t it funny, what they do put in the newspapers,” he said. “Here are two leaders—” he held out his Daily Telegraph, “full of the ordinary newspaper cant—” he scanned the columns down—“and then there’s this little—I dunno what you’d call it, essay, almost—appearing with the leaders, and saying there must arise a man who will give new values to things, give us new truths, a new attitude to life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness in a few years, a country in ruin—”
“I suppose that’s a bit of newspaper cant, as well,” said Birkin.
“It sounds as if the man meant it, and quite genuinely,” said Gerald.
“Give it to me,” said Birkin, holding out his hand for the paper.
The train came, and they went on board, sitting on either side a little table, by the window, in the restaurant car. Birkin glanced over his paper, then looked up at Gerald, who was waiting for him.
“I believe
