He remained only a few minutes longer, then took his leave. When he was
gone Ursula felt such a poignant hatred of him, that all her brain
seemed turned into a sharp crystal of fine hatred. Her whole nature
seemed sharpened and intensified into a pure dart of hate. She could
not imagine what it was. It merely took hold of her, the most poignant
and ultimate hatred, pure and clear and beyond thought. She could not
think of it at all, she was translated beyond herself. It was like a
possession. She felt she was possessed. And for several days she went
about possessed by this exquisite force of hatred against him. It
surpassed anything she had ever known before, it seemed to throw her
out of the world into some terrible region where nothing of her old
life held good. She was quite lost and dazed, really dead to her own
life.
It was so completely incomprehensible and irrational. She did not know
WHY she hated him, her hate was quite abstract. She had only realised
with a shock that stunned her, that she was overcome by this pure
transportation. He was the enemy, fine as a diamond, and as hard and
jewel-like, the quintessence of all that was inimical.
She thought of his face, white and purely wrought, and of his eyes that
had such a dark, constant will of assertion, and she touched her own
forehead, to feel if she were mad, she was so transfigured in white
flame of essential hate.
It was not temporal, her hatred, she did not hate him for this or for
that; she did not want to do anything to him, to have any connection
with him. Her relation was ultimate and utterly beyond words, the hate
was so pure and gemlike. It was as if he were a beam of essential
enmity, a beam of light that did not only destroy her, but denied her
altogether, revoked her whole world. She saw him as a clear stroke of
uttermost contradiction, a strange gem-like being whose existence
defined her own non-existence. When she heard he was ill again, her
hatred only intensified itself a few degrees, if that were possible. It
stunned her and annihilated her, but she could not escape it. She could
not escape this transfiguration of hatred that had come upon her.