'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.
She laid down her work and looked at her sister. She thought Gudrun so
CHARMING, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine,
exquisite richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain
playfulness about her too, such a piquancy or ironic suggestion, such
an untouched reserve. Ursula admired her with all her soul.
'Why did you come home, Prune?' she asked.
Gudrun knew she was being admired. She sat back from her drawing and
looked at Ursula, from under her finely-curved lashes.
'Why did I come back, Ursula?' she repeated. 'I have asked myself a
thousand times.'
'And don't you know?'
'Yes, I think I do. I think my coming back home was just RECULER POUR
MIEUX SAUTER.'
And she looked with a long, slow look of knowledge at Ursula.
'I know!' cried Ursula, looking slightly dazzled and falsified, and as
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