Winifred smiled slightly.
“Who told you, Daddie?” she asked.
“Who told me? Hermione told me, and Rupert Birkin.”
“Do you know them?” Winifred asked of Gudrun, turning to her with faint challenge.
“Yes,” said Gudrun.
Winifred readjusted herself a little. She had been ready to accept Gudrun as a sort of servant. Now she saw it was on terms of friendship they were intended to meet. She was rather glad. She had so many half inferiors, whom she tolerated with perfect good-humour.
Gudrun was very calm. She also did not take these things very seriously. A new occasion was mostly spectacular to her. However, Winifred was a detached, ironic child, she would never attach herself. Gudrun liked her and was intrigued by her. The first meetings went off with a certain humiliating clumsiness. Neither Winifred nor her instructress had any social grace.
Soon, however, they met in a kind of make-belief world. Winifred did not notice human beings unless they were like herself, playful and slightly mocking. She would accept nothing but the world of amusement, and the serious people of her life were the animals she had for pets. On those she lavished, almost ironically, her affection and her companionship. To the rest of the human scheme she submitted with a faint bored indifference.
She had a pekinese dog called Looloo, which she loved.
“Let us draw Looloo,” said Gudrun, “and see if we can get his Looliness, shall we?”
“Darling!” cried Winifred, rushing to the dog, that sat with contemplative sadness on the hearth, and kissing its bulging brow. “Darling one, will you be drawn? Shall its mummy draw its portrait?” Then she chuckled gleefully, and turning to Gudrun, said: “Oh let’s!”
They proceeded to get pencils and paper, and were ready.
“Beautifullest,” cried Winifred, hugging the dog, “sit still while its mummy draws its beautiful portrait.” The dog looked up at her with grievous resignation in its large, prominent eyes. She kissed it fervently, and said: “I wonder what mine will be like. It’s sure to be awful.”
As she sketched she chuckled to herself, and cried out at times:
“Oh darling, you’re so beautiful!”
And again chuckling, she rushed to embrace the dog, in penitence, as if she were doing him some subtle injury. He sat all the time with the resignation and fretfulness of ages on his dark velvety face. She drew slowly, with a wicked concentration in her eyes, her head on one side, an intense stillness over her. She was as if working the spell of some enchantment. Suddenly she had finished. She looked at the dog, and then at her drawing, and then cried, with real grief for the dog, and at the same time with a wicked exultation:
“My beautiful, why did they?”
She took her paper to the dog, and held it under his nose. He turned his head aside as in chagrin and mortification, and she impulsively kissed his velvety bulging forehead.
“ ’s a Loolie, ’s a little Loozie! Look at his portrait, darling, look at his portrait, that his mother has done of him.” She looked at her paper and chuckled. Then, kissing the dog once more, she rose and came gravely to Gudrun, offering her the paper.
It was a grotesque little diagram of a grotesque little animal, so wicked and so comical, a slow smile came over Gudrun’s face, unconsciously. And at her side Winifred chuckled with glee, and said:
“It isn’t like him, is it? He’s much lovelier than that. He’s so beautiful-mmm, Looloo, my sweet darling.” And she flew off to embrace the chagrined little dog. He looked up at her with reproachful, saturnine eyes, vanquished in his extreme agedness of being. Then she flew back to her drawing, and chuckled with satisfaction.
“It isn’t like him, is it?” she said to Gudrun.
“Yes, it’s very like him,” Gudrun replied.
The child treasured her drawing, carried it about with her, and showed it, with a silent embarrassment, to everybody.
“Look,” she said, thrusting the paper into her father’s hand.
“Why that’s Looloo!” he exclaimed. And he looked down in surprise, hearing the almost inhuman chuckle of the child at his side.
Gerald was away from home when Gudrun first came to Shortlands. But the first morning he came back he watched for her. It was a sunny, soft morning, and he lingered in the garden paths, looking at the flowers that had come out during his absence. He was clean and fit as ever, shaven, his fair hair scrupulously parted at the side, bright in the sunshine, his short, fair moustache closely clipped, his eyes with their humorous kind twinkle, which was so deceptive. He was dressed in black, his clothes sat well on his well-nourished body. Yet as he lingered before the flowerbeds in the morning sunshine, there was a certain isolation, a fear about him, as of something wanting.
Gudrun came up quickly, unseen. She was dressed in blue, with woollen yellow stockings, like the Bluecoat boys. He glanced up in surprise. Her stockings always disconcerted him, the pale-yellow stockings and the heavy heavy black shoes. Winifred, who had been playing about the garden with Mademoiselle and the dogs, came flitting towards Gudrun. The child wore a dress of black-and-white stripes. Her hair was rather short, cut round and hanging level in her neck.
“We’re going to do Bismarck, aren’t we?” she said, linking her hand through Gudrun’s arm.
“Yes, we’re going to do Bismarck. Do you want to?”
“Oh yes-oh I do! I want most awfully to do Bismarck. He looks so splendid this morning, so fierce. He’s almost as big as a lion.” And the child chuckled sardonically at her own hyperbole. “He’s a real king, he really is.”
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle,” said the little French governess, wavering up with a slight bow, a bow of the sort that Gudrun loathed, insolent.
“Winifred veut tant faire le portrait de Bismarck—! Oh, mais toute la matinée—‘We
