"But I've got to go to Kingston," said Ursula.
"They've sent for me."
"They'll do without you," he said.
There was a trembling silence when she was on the point of
tears.
"Well," she said, low and tense, "you can put me off this,
but I'm going to have a place. I'm not going to
stop at home."
"Nobody wants you to stop at home," he suddenly shouted,
going livid with rage.
She said no more. Her nature had gone hard and smiling in its
own arrogance, in its own antagonistic indifference to the rest
of them. This was the state in which he wanted to kill her. She
went singing into the parlour.
C'est la mère Michel qui a perdu son chat,
Qui cri par la fenetre qu'est-ce qui le lue renda----"
During the next days Ursula went about bright and hard,
singing to herself, making love to the children, but her soul
hard and cold with regard to her parents. Nothing more was said.
The hardness and brightness lasted for four days. Then it began
to break up. So at evening she said to her father: "Have you spoken about a place for me?"
"I spoke to Mr. Burt."
"What did he say?"
"There's a committee meeting to-morrow. He'll tell me on
Friday."
So she waited till Friday. Kingston-on-Thames had been an
exciting dream. Here she could feel the hard, raw reality. So
she knew that this would come to pass. Because nothing was ever
fulfilled, she found, except in the hard limited reality. She
did not want to be a teacher in Ilkeston, because she knew
Ilkeston, and hated it. But she wanted to be free, so she must
take her freedom where she could.
On Friday her father said there was a place vacant in
Brinsley Street school. This could most probably be secured for
her, at once, without the trouble of application.
Her heart halted. Brinsley Street was a school in a poor
quarter, and she had had a taste of the common children of
Ilkeston. They had shouted after her and thrown stones. Still,
as a teacher, she would be in authority. And it was all unknown.
She was excited. The very forest of dry, sterile brick had some
fascination for her. It was so hard and ugly, so relentlessly
ugly, it would purge her of some of her floating
sentimentality.
She dreamed how she would make the little, ugly children love
her. She would be so personal. Teachers were always so
hard and impersonal. There was no vivid relationship. She would
make everything personal and vivid, she would give herself, she
would give, give, give all her great stores of wealth to her
children, she would make them so happy, and they would prefer
her to any teacher on the face of the earth.