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
if she did NOT know. 'But where can one jump to?' 'Oh, it doesn't matter,' said Gudrun, somewhat superbly. 'If one jumps
over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.' 'But isn't it very risky?' asked Ursula.
A slow mocking smile dawned on Gudrun's face.
'Ah!' she said laughing. 'What is it all but words!' And so again she
closed the conversation. But Ursula was still brooding.
'And how do you find home, now you have come back to it?' she asked.
Gudrun paused for some moments, coldly, before answering. Then, in a
cold truthful voice, she said: 'I find myself completely out of it.' 'And father?' Gudrun looked at Ursula, almost with resentment, as if brought to bay.
'I haven't thought about him: I've refrained,' she said coldly.
'Yes,' wavered Ursula; and the conversation was really at an end. The
sisters found themselves confronted by a void, a terrifying chasm, as
if they had looked over the edge.
They worked on in silence for some time, Gudrun's cheek was flushed
with repressed emotion. She resented its having been called into being.
'Shall we go out and look at that wedding?' she asked at length, in a
voice that was too casual.
'Yes!' cried Ursula, too eagerly, throwing aside her sewing and leaping
up, as if to escape something, thus betraying the tension of the
situation and causing a friction of dislike to go over Gudrun's nerves.
As she went upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of her home round
about her. And she loathed it, the sordid, too-familiar place! She was
afraid at the depth of her feeling against the home, the milieu, the
whole atmosphere and condition of this obsolete life. Her feeling
frightened her.
The two girls were soon walking swiftly down the main road of Beldover,
a wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and
sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and
Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery
town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid
gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed
to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was
strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the full
effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why had she
wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to submit herself to
it, the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this
defaced countryside? She felt like a beetle toiling in the dust. She
was filled with repulsion.