Birkin turned curiously to look at Ursula.
Her eyes were round and wondering, bewildered, her mouth quivered slightly.
She looked like one who is suddenly wakened.
There was a living, tender beauty, like a tender light of dawn shining from her face.
He looked at her with a new pleasure, feeling gay in his heart, irresponsible.
'You are doing catkins?' he asked, picking up a piece of hazel from a scholar's desk in front of him. 'Are they as far out as this?
I hadn't noticed them this year.'
He looked absorbedly at the tassel of hazel in his hand.
'The red ones too!' he said, looking at the flickers of crimson that came from the female bud.
Then he went in among the desks, to see the scholars' books.
Ursula watched his intent progress.
There was a stillness in his motion that hushed the activities of her heart.
She seemed to be standing aside in arrested silence, watching him move in another, concentrated world.
His presence was so quiet, almost like a vacancy in the corporate air.
Suddenly he lifted his face to her, and her heart quickened at the flicker of his voice.
'Give them some crayons, won't you?' he said, 'so that they can make the gynaecious flowers red, and the androgynous yellow.
I'd chalk them in plain, chalk in nothing else, merely the red and the yellow.
Outline scarcely matters in this case.
There is just the one fact to emphasise.'
'I haven't any crayons,' said Ursula.
'There will be some somewhere—red and yellow, that's all you want.'
Ursula sent out a boy on a quest.
'It will make the books untidy,' she said to Birkin, flushing deeply.
'Not very,' he said. 'You must mark in these things obviously.
It's the fact you want to emphasise, not the subjective impression to record.
What's the fact?—red little spiky stigmas of the female flower, dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the other.
Make a pictorial record of the fact, as a child does when drawing a face—two eyes, one nose, mouth with teeth—so—' And he drew a figure on the blackboard.
At that moment another vision was seen through the glass panels of the door.
It was Hermione Roddice.
Birkin went and opened to her.
'I saw your car,' she said to him. 'Do you mind my coming to find you?
I wanted to see you when you were on duty.'
She looked at him for a long time, intimate and playful, then she gave a short little laugh.
And then only she turned to Ursula, who, with all the class, had been watching the little scene between the lovers.
'How do you do, Miss Brangwen,' sang Hermione, in her low, odd, singing fashion, that sounded almost as if she were poking fun. 'Do you mind my coming in?'
Her grey, almost sardonic eyes rested all the while on Ursula, as if summing her up.
'Oh no,' said Ursula.
'Are you SURE?' repeated Hermione, with complete sang froid, and an odd, half-bullying effrontery.
'Oh no, I like it awfully,' laughed Ursula, a little bit excited and bewildered, because Hermione seemed to be compelling her, coming very close to her, as if intimate with her; and yet, how could she be intimate?
This was the answer Hermione wanted.
She turned satisfied to Birkin.
'What are you doing?' she sang, in her casual, inquisitive fashion.
'Catkins,' he replied.
'Really!' she said. 'And what do you learn about them?'
She spoke all the while in a mocking, half teasing fashion, as if making game of the whole business.
She picked up a twig of the catkin, piqued by Birkin's attention to it.
She was a strange figure in the class-room, wearing a large, old cloak of greenish cloth, on which was a raised pattern of dull gold.
The high collar, and the inside of the cloak, was lined with dark fur.
Beneath she had a dress of fine lavender-coloured cloth, trimmed with fur, and her hat was close-fitting, made of fur and of the dull, green-and-gold figured stuff.
She was tall and strange, she looked as if she had come out of some new, bizarre picture.