The Rainbow

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."