The bridesmaids were here, and yet the bridegroom had not come. Ursula
wondered if something was amiss, and if the wedding would yet all go
wrong. She felt troubled, as if it rested upon her. The chief
bridesmaids had arrived. Ursula watched them come up the steps. One of
them she knew, a tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair
and a pale, long face. This was Hermione Roddice, a friend of the
Criches. Now she came along, with her head held up, balancing an
enormous flat hat of pale yellow velvet, on which were streaks of
ostrich feathers, natural and grey. She drifted forward as if scarcely
conscious, her long blanched face lifted up, not to see the world. She
was rich. She wore a dress of silky, frail velvet, of pale yellow
colour, and she carried a lot of small rose-coloured cyclamens. Her
shoes and stockings were of brownish grey, like the feathers on her
hat, her hair was heavy, she drifted along with a peculiar fixity of
the hips, a strange unwilling motion. She was impressive, in her lovely
pale-yellow and brownish-rose, yet macabre, something repulsive. People
were silent when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet
for some reason silenced. Her long, pale face, that she carried lifted
up, somewhat in the Rossetti fashion, seemed almost drugged, as if a
strange mass of thoughts coiled in the darkness within her, and she was
never allowed to escape.
Ursula watched her with fascination. She knew her a little. She was the
most remarkable woman in the Midlands. Her father was a Derbyshire
Baronet of the old school, she was a woman of the new school, full of
intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness. She was
passionately interested in reform, her soul was given up to the public
cause. But she was a man's woman, it was the manly world that held her.
She had various intimacies of mind and soul with various men of
capacity. Ursula knew, among these men, only Rupert Birkin, who was one
of the school-inspectors of the county. But Gudrun had met others, in
London. Moving with her artist friends in different kinds of society,
Gudrun had already come to know a good many people of repute and
standing. She had met Hermione twice, but they did not take to each
other. It would be queer to meet again down here in the Midlands, where
their social standing was so diverse, after they had known each other
on terms of equality in the houses of sundry acquaintances in town. For
Gudrun had been a social success, and had her friends among the slack
aristocracy that keeps touch with the arts.
Hermione knew herself to be well-dressed; she knew herself to be the
social equal, if not far the superior, of anyone she was likely to meet
in Willey Green. She knew she was accepted in the world of culture and
of intellect. She was a KULTURTRAGER, a medium for the culture of
ideas. With all that was highest, whether in society or in thought or
in public action, or even in art, she was at one, she moved among the
foremost, at home with them. No one could put her down, no one could
make mock of her, because she stood among the first, and those that
were against her were below her, either in rank, or in wealth, or in
high association of thought and progress and understanding. So, she was
invulnerable. All her life, she had sought to make herself
invulnerable, unassailable, beyond reach of the world's judgment.