we should be falling over ourselves for the privilege.'
'I can't understand, Ursula, what you are so much put out about,' said
Gudrun, in some exasperation. 'One knows those women are
impudent--these free women who have emancipated themselves from the
aristocracy.'
'But it is so UNNECESSARY--so vulgar,' cried Ursula.
'No, I don't see it. And if I did--pour moi, elle n'existe pas. I don't
grant her the power to be impudent to me.'
'Do you think she likes you?' asked Ursula.
'Well, no, I shouldn't think she did.'
'Then why does she ask you to go to Breadalby and stay with her?'
Gudrun lifted her shoulders in a low shrug.
'After all, she's got the sense to know we're not just the ordinary
run,' said Gudrun. 'Whatever she is, she's not a fool. And I'd rather
have somebody I detested, than the ordinary woman who keeps to her own
set. Hermione Roddice does risk herself in some respects.'
Ursula pondered this for a time.
'I doubt it,' she replied. 'Really she risks nothing. I suppose we
ought to admire her for knowing she CAN invite us--school teachers--and
risk nothing.'
'Precisely!' said Gudrun. 'Think of the myriads of women that daren't
do it. She makes the most of her privileges--that's something. I
suppose, really, we should do the same, in her place.'
'No,' said Ursula. 'No. It would bore me. I couldn't spend my time
playing her games. It's infra dig.'
The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything
that came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one
sharpened against the other.
'Of course,' cried Ursula suddenly, 'she ought to thank her stars if we
will go and see her. You are perfectly beautiful, a thousand times more
beautiful than ever she is or was, and to my thinking, a thousand times
more beautifully dressed, for she never looks fresh and natural, like a
flower, always old, thought-out; and we ARE more intelligent than most
people.'
'Undoubtedly!' said Gudrun.
'And it ought to be admitted, simply,' said Ursula.
'Certainly it ought,' said Gudrun. 'But you'll find that the really
chic thing is to be so absolutely ordinary, so perfectly commonplace
and like the person in the street, that you really are a masterpiece of
humanity, not the person in the street actually, but the artistic
creation of her--'
'How awful!' cried Ursula.
'Yes, Ursula, it IS awful, in most respects. You daren't be anything
that isn't amazingly A TERRE, SO much A TERRE that it is the artistic
creation of ordinariness.'
'It's very dull to create oneself into nothing better,' laughed Ursula.
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