You were quite right, to biff me--because I know you wanted to. So
there's the end of it.
In the train, however, he felt ill. Every motion was insufferable pain,
and he was sick. He dragged himself from the station into a cab,
feeling his way step by step, like a blind man, and held up only by a
dim will.
For a week or two he was ill, but he did not let Hermione know, and she
thought he was sulking; there was a complete estrangement between them.
She became rapt, abstracted in her conviction of exclusive
righteousness. She lived in and by her own self-esteem, conviction of
her own rightness of spirit.
CHAPTER IX.
COAL-DUST
Going home from school in the afternoon, the Brangwen girls descended
the hill between the picturesque cottages of Willey Green till they
came to the railway crossing. There they found the gate shut, because
the colliery train was rumbling nearer. They could hear the small
locomotive panting hoarsely as it advanced with caution between the
embankments. The one-legged man in the little signal-hut by the road
stared out from his security, like a crab from a snail-shell.
Whilst the two girls waited, Gerald Crich trotted up on a red Arab
mare. He rode well and softly, pleased with the delicate quivering of
the creature between his knees. And he was very picturesque, at least
in Gudrun's eyes, sitting soft and close on the slender red mare, whose
long tail flowed on the air. He saluted the two girls, and drew up at
the crossing to wait for the gate, looking down the railway for the
approaching train. In spite of her ironic smile at his picturesqueness,
Gudrun liked to look at him. He was well-set and easy, his face with
its warm tan showed up his whitish, coarse moustache, and his blue eyes
were full of sharp light as he watched the distance.
The locomotive chuffed slowly between the banks, hidden. The mare did
not like it. She began to wince away, as if hurt by the unknown noise.
But Gerald pulled her back and held her head to the gate. The sharp
blasts of the chuffing engine broke with more and more force on her.
The repeated sharp blows of unknown, terrifying noise struck through
her till she was rocking with terror. She recoiled like a spring let
go. But a glistening, half-smiling look came into Gerald's face. He
brought her back again, inevitably.
The noise was released, the little locomotive with her clanking steel
connecting-rod emerged on the highroad, clanking sharply. The mare
rebounded like a drop of water from hot iron. Ursula and Gudrun pressed
back into the hedge, in fear. But Gerald was heavy on the mare, and
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