Women in Love

There was a jumble market every Monday afternoon in the old

market-place in town. Ursula and Birkin strayed down there one

afternoon. They had been talking of furniture, and they wanted to see

if there was any fragment they would like to buy, amid the heaps of

rubbish collected on the cobble-stones.

The old market-square was not very large, a mere bare patch of granite

setts, usually with a few fruit-stalls under a wall. It was in a poor

quarter of the town. Meagre houses stood down one side, there was a

hosiery factory, a great blank with myriad oblong windows, at the end,

a street of little shops with flagstone pavement down the other side,

and, for a crowning monument, the public baths, of new red brick, with

a clock-tower. The people who moved about seemed stumpy and sordid, the

air seemed to smell rather dirty, there was a sense of many mean

streets ramifying off into warrens of meanness. Now and again a great

chocolate-and-yellow tramcar ground round a difficult bend under the

hosiery factory.

Ursula was superficially thrilled when she found herself out among the

common people, in the jumbled place piled with old bedding, heaps of

old iron, shabby crockery in pale lots, muffled lots of unthinkable

clothing. She and Birkin went unwillingly down the narrow aisle between

the rusty wares. He was looking at the goods, she at the people.

She excitedly watched a young woman, who was going to have a baby, and

who was turning over a mattress and making a young man, down-at-heel

and dejected, feel it also. So secretive and active and anxious the

young woman seemed, so reluctant, slinking, the young man. He was going

to marry her because she was having a child.

When they had felt the mattress, the young woman asked the old man

seated on a stool among his wares, how much it was. He told her, and

she turned to the young man. The latter was ashamed, and selfconscious.

He turned his face away, though he left his body standing there, and

muttered aside. And again the woman anxiously and actively fingered the

mattress and added up in her mind and bargained with the old, unclean

man. All the while, the young man stood by, shamefaced and

down-at-heel, submitting.

'Look,' said Birkin, 'there is a pretty chair.' 'Charming!' cried Ursula. 'Oh, charming.' It was an arm-chair of simple wood, probably birch, but of such fine

delicacy of grace, standing there on the sordid stones, it almost

brought tears to the eyes. It was square in shape, of the purest,

slender lines, and four short lines of wood in the back, that reminded

Ursula of harpstrings.