the illness counts so much, after that. One is ill because one doesn't
live properly--can't. It's the failure to live that makes one ill, and
humiliates one.'
'But do you fail to live?' she asked, almost jeering.
'Why yes--I don't make much of a success of my days. One seems always
to be bumping one's nose against the blank wall ahead.'
Ursula laughed. She was frightened, and when she was frightened she
always laughed and pretended to be jaunty.
'Your poor nose!' she said, looking at that feature of his face.
'No wonder it's ugly,' he replied.
She was silent for some minutes, struggling with her own
self-deception. It was an instinct in her, to deceive herself.
'But I'M happy--I think life is AWFULLY jolly,' she said.
'Good,' he answered, with a certain cold indifference.
She reached for a bit of paper which had wrapped a small piece of
chocolate she had found in her pocket, and began making a boat. He
watched her without heeding her. There was something strangely pathetic
and tender in her moving, unconscious finger-tips, that were agitated
and hurt, really.
'I DO enjoy things--don't you?' she asked.
'Oh yes! But it infuriates me that I can't get right, at the really
growing part of me. I feel all tangled and messed up, and I CAN'T get
straight anyhow. I don't know what really to DO. One must do something
somewhere.'
'Why should you always be DOING?' she retorted. 'It is so plebeian. I
think it is much better to be really patrician, and to do nothing but
just be oneself, like a walking flower.'
'I quite agree,' he said, 'if one has burst into blossom. But I can't
get my flower to blossom anyhow. Either it is blighted in the bud, or
has got the smother-fly, or it isn't nourished. Curse it, it isn't even
a bud. It is a contravened knot.'
Again she laughed. He was so very fretful and exasperated. But she was
anxious and puzzled. How was one to get out, anyhow. There must be a
way out somewhere.
There was a silence, wherein she wanted to cry. She reached for another
bit of chocolate paper, and began to fold another boat.
'And why is it,' she asked at length, 'that there is no flowering, no
dignity of human life now?'
'The whole idea is dead. Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really. There
are myriads of human beings hanging on the bush--and they look very
nice and rosy, your healthy young men and women. But they are apples of
Sodom, as a matter of fact, Dead Sea Fruit, gall-apples. It isn't true
that they have any significance--their insides are full of bitter,
corrupt ash.'
'But there ARE good people,' protested Ursula.
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