It is quite comfortable.'
'What takes you to Florence?'
'I don't know,' said Hermione slowly.
Then she looked at him with her slow, heavy gaze.
'Barnes is starting his school of aesthetics, and Olandese is going to give a set of discourses on the Italian national policy-'
'Both rubbish,' he said.
'No, I don't think so,' said Hermione.
'Which do you admire, then?'
'I admire both.
Barnes is a pioneer.
And then I am interested in Italy, in her coming to national consciousness.'
'I wish she'd come to something different from national consciousness, then,' said Birkin; 'especially as it only means a sort of commercial-industrial consciousness.
I hate Italy and her national rant.
And I think Barnes is an amateur.'
Hermione was silent for some moments, in a state of hostility.
But yet, she had got Birkin back again into her world!
How subtle her influence was, she seemed to start his irritable attention into her direction exclusively, in one minute.
He was her creature.
'No,' she said, 'you are wrong.'
Then a sort of tension came over her, she raised her face like the pythoness inspired with oracles, and went on, in rhapsodic manner:
'Il Sandro mi scrive che ha accolto il piu grande entusiasmo, tutti i giovani, e fanciulle e ragazzi, sono tutti—' She went on in Italian, as if, in thinking of the Italians she thought in their language.
He listened with a shade of distaste to her rhapsody, then he said:
'For all that, I don't like it.
Their nationalism is just industrialism—that and a shallow jealousy I detest so much.'
'I think you are wrong—I think you are wrong—' said Hermione. 'It seems to me purely spontaneous and beautiful, the modern Italian's PASSION, for it is a passion, for Italy, L'Italia—'
'Do you know Italy well?' Ursula asked of Hermione.
Hermione hated to be broken in upon in this manner.
Yet she answered mildly:
'Yes, pretty well.
I spent several years of my girlhood there, with my mother.
My mother died in Florence.'
'Oh.'
There was a pause, painful to Ursula and to Birkin.
Hermione however seemed abstracted and calm.
Birkin was white, his eyes glowed as if he were in a fever, he was far too over-wrought.
How Ursula suffered in this tense atmosphere of strained wills!
Her head seemed bound round by iron bands.
Birkin rang the bell for tea.
They could not wait for Gudrun any longer.
When the door was opened, the cat walked in.
'Micio!
Micio!' called Hermione, in her slow, deliberate sing-song.
The young cat turned to look at her, then, with his slow and stately walk he advanced to her side.
'Vieni—vieni qua,' Hermione was saying, in her strange caressive, protective voice, as if she were always the elder, the mother superior. 'Vieni dire Buon' Giorno alla zia.
Mi ricorde, mi ricorde bene—non he vero, piccolo?
E vero che mi ricordi?
E vero?'
And slowly she rubbed his head, slowly and with ironic indifference.
'Does he understand Italian?' said Ursula, who knew nothing of the language.
'Yes,' said Hermione at length. 'His mother was Italian.