Women in Love

'I was hoping now for a man to come along,' Gudrun said, suddenly

catching her underlip between her teeth, and making a strange grimace,

half sly smiling, half anguish. Ursula was afraid.

'So you have come home, expecting him here?' she laughed.

'Oh my dear,' cried Gudrun, strident, 'I wouldn't go out of my way to

look for him. But if there did happen to come along a highly attractive

individual of sufficient means--well--' she tailed off ironically. Then

she looked searchingly at Ursula, as if to probe her. 'Don't you find

yourself getting bored?' she asked of her sister. 'Don't you find, that

things fail to materialise? NOTHING MATERIALISES! Everything withers in

the bud.' 'What withers in the bud?' asked Ursula.

'Oh, everything--oneself--things in general.' There was a pause, whilst

each sister vaguely considered her fate.

'It does frighten one,' said Ursula, and again there was a pause. 'But

do you hope to get anywhere by just marrying?' 'It seems to be the inevitable next step,' said Gudrun. Ursula pondered

this, with a little bitterness. She was a class mistress herself, in

Willey Green Grammar School, as she had been for some years.

'I know,' she said, 'it seems like that when one thinks in the

abstract. But really imagine it: imagine any man one knows, imagine him

coming home to one every evening, and saying "Hello," and giving one a

kiss--' There was a blank pause.

'Yes,' said Gudrun, in a narrowed voice. 'It's just impossible. The man

makes it impossible.' 'Of course there's children--' said Ursula doubtfully.

Gudrun's face hardened.

'Do you REALLY want children, Ursula?' she asked coldly. A dazzled,

baffled look came on Ursula's face.

'One feels it is still beyond one,' she said.

'DO you feel like that?' asked Gudrun. 'I get no feeling whatever from

the thought of bearing children.' Gudrun looked at Ursula with a masklike, expressionless face. Ursula

knitted her brows.

'Perhaps it isn't genuine,' she faltered. 'Perhaps one doesn't really

want them, in one's soul--only superficially.' A hardness came over

Gudrun's face. She did not want to be too definite.

'When one thinks of other people's children--' said Ursula.

Again Gudrun looked at her sister, almost hostile.

'Exactly,' she said, to close the conversation.

The two sisters worked on in silence, Ursula having always that strange

brightness of an essential flame that is caught, meshed, contravened.

She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from

day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp

it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but

underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she

could break through the last integuments! She seemed to try and put her

hands out, like an infant in the womb, and she could not, not yet.

Still she had a strange prescience, an intimation of something yet to

come.