Women in Love

'The red ones too!' he said, looking at the flickers of crimson that

came from the female bud.

Then he went in among the desks, to see the scholars' books. Ursula

watched his intent progress. There was a stillness in his motion that

hushed the activities of her heart. She seemed to be standing aside in

arrested silence, watching him move in another, concentrated world. His

presence was so quiet, almost like a vacancy in the corporate air.

Suddenly he lifted his face to her, and her heart quickened at the

flicker of his voice.

'Give them some crayons, won't you?' he said, 'so that they can make

the gynaecious flowers red, and the androgynous yellow. I'd chalk them

in plain, chalk in nothing else, merely the red and the yellow. Outline

scarcely matters in this case. There is just the one fact to

emphasise.' 'I haven't any crayons,' said Ursula.

'There will be some somewhere--red and yellow, that's all you want.' Ursula sent out a boy on a quest.

'It will make the books untidy,' she said to Birkin, flushing deeply.

'Not very,' he said. 'You must mark in these things obviously. It's the

fact you want to emphasise, not the subjective impression to record.

What's the fact?--red little spiky stigmas of the female flower,

dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the

other. Make a pictorial record of the fact, as a child does when

drawing a face--two eyes, one nose, mouth with teeth--so--' And he drew

a figure on the blackboard.

At that moment another vision was seen through the glass panels of the

door. It was Hermione Roddice. Birkin went and opened to her.

'I saw your car,' she said to him. 'Do you mind my coming to find you?

I wanted to see you when you were on duty.' She looked at him for a long time, intimate and playful, then she gave

a short little laugh. And then only she turned to Ursula, who, with all

the class, had been watching the little scene between the lovers.

'How do you do, Miss Brangwen,' sang Hermione, in her low, odd, singing

fashion, that sounded almost as if she were poking fun. 'Do you mind my

coming in?' Her grey, almost sardonic eyes rested all the while on Ursula, as if

summing her up.

'Oh no,' said Ursula.

'Are you SURE?' repeated Hermione, with complete sang froid, and an

odd, half-bullying effrontery.

'Oh no, I like it awfully,' laughed Ursula, a little bit excited and

bewildered, because Hermione seemed to be compelling her, coming very

close to her, as if intimate with her; and yet, how could she be

intimate?