Women in Love

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.