Ah, it was a dull agony to her to remember what she had been
then. For it was remembering a dead self. All that was dead
after Winifred. She knew the corpse of her young, loving self,
she knew its grave. And the young living self she mourned for
had scarcely existed, it was the creature of her
imagination.
Deep within her a cold despair remained unchanging and
unchanged. No one would ever love her now--she would love
no one. The body of love was killed in her after Winifred, there
was something of the corpse in her. She would live, she would go
on, but she would have no lovers, no lover would want her any
more. She herself would want no lover. The vividest little flame
of desire was extinct in her for ever. The tiny, vivid germ that
contained the bud of her real self, her real love, was killed,
she would go on growing as a plant, she would do her best to
produce her minor flowers, but her leading flower was dead
before it was born, all her growth was the conveying of a corpse
of hope.
The miserable weeks went on, in the poky house crammed with
children. What was her life--a sordid, formless,
disintegrated nothing; Ursula Brangwen a person without worth or
importance, living in the mean village of Cossethay, within the
sordid scope of Ilkeston. Ursula Brangwen, at seventeen,
worthless and unvalued, neither wanted nor needed by anybody,
and conscious herself of her own dead value. It would not bear
thinking of.
But still her dogged pride held its own. She might be
defiled, she might be a corpse that should never be loved, she
might be a core-rotten stalk living upon the food that others
provided; yet she would give in to nobody.
Gradually she became conscious that she could not go on
living at home as she was doing, without place or meaning or
worth. The very children that went to school held her
uselessness in contempt. She must do something.
Her father said she had plenty to do to help her mother. From
her parents she would never get more than a hit in the face. She
was not a practical person. She thought of wild things, of
running away and becoming a domestic servant, of asking some man
to take her.
She wrote to the mistress of the High School for advice.
"I cannot see very clearly what you should do, Ursula," came
the reply, "unless you are willing to become an elementary
school teacher. You have matriculated, and that qualifies you to
take a post as uncertificated teacher in any school, at a salary
of about fifty pounds a year.
"I cannot tell you how deeply I sympathize with you in your
desire to do something. You will learn that mankind is a great
body of which you are one useful member, you will take your own
place at the great task which humanity is trying to fulfil. That
will give you a satisfaction and a self-respect which nothing
else could give."