Shocked and startled, Ursula was carried to her Uncle Tom's
house. He was not yet at home. His house was simply, but well
furnished. He had taken out a dividing wall, and made the whole
front of the house into a large library, with one end devoted to
his science. It was a handsome room, appointed as a laboratory
and reading room, but giving the same sense of hard, mechanical
activity, activity mechanical yet inchoate, and looking out on
the hideous abstraction of the town, and at the green meadows
and rough country beyond, and at the great, mathematical
colliery on the other side.
They saw Tom Brangwen walking up the curved drive. He was
getting stouter, but with his bowler hat worn well set down on
his brows, he looked manly, handsome, curiously like any other
man of action. His colour was as fresh, his health as perfect as
ever, he walked like a man rather absorbed.
Winifred Inger was startled when he entered the library, his
coat fastened and correct, his head bald to the crown, but not
shiny, rather like something naked that one is accustomed to see
covered, and his dark eyes liquid and formless. He seemed to
stand in the shadow, like a thing ashamed. And the clasp of his
hand was so soft and yet so forceful, that it chilled the heart.
She was afraid of him, repelled by him, and yet attracted.
He looked at the athletic, seemingly fearless girl, and he
detected in her a kinship with his own dark corruption.
Immediately, he knew they were akin.
His manner was polite, almost foreign, and rather cold. He
still laughed in his curious, animal fashion, suddenly wrinkling
up his wide nose, and showing his sharp teeth. The fine beauty
of his skin and his complexion, some almost waxen quality, hid
the strange, repellent grossness of him, the slight sense of
putrescence, the commonness which revealed itself in his rather
fat thighs and loins.
Winifred saw at once the deferential, slightly servile,
slightly cunning regard he had for Ursula, which made the girl
at once so proud and so perplexed.
"But is this place as awful as it looks?" the young girl
asked, a strain in her eyes.
"It is just what it looks," he said. "It hides nothing."
"Why are the men so sad?"
"Are they sad?" he replied.
"They seem unutterably, unutterably sad," said Ursula, out of
a passionate throat.
"I don't think they are that. They just take it for
granted."
"What do they take for granted?"
"This--the pits and the place altogether."
"Why don't they alter it?" she passionately protested.
"They believe they must alter themselves to fit the pits and
the place, rather than alter the pits and the place to fit
themselves. It is easier," he said.
"And you agree with them," burst out his niece, unable to
bear it. "You think like they do--that living human beings
must be taken and adapted to all kinds of horrors. We could
easily do without the pits."