Some white daisies were out, bright as angels.
In the air, the unfolding leaves of a copper-beech were blood-red.
Punctually at eleven o'clock, the carriages began to arrive.
There was a stir in the crowd at the gate, a concentration as a carriage drove up, wedding guests were mounting up the steps and passing along the red carpet to the church.
They were all gay and excited because the sun was shining.
Gudrun watched them closely, with objective curiosity.
She saw each one as a complete figure, like a character in a book, or a subject in a picture, or a marionette in a theatre, a finished creation.
She loved to recognise their various characteristics, to place them in their true light, give them their own surroundings, settle them for ever as they passed before her along the path to the church.
She knew them, they were finished, sealed and stamped and finished with, for her.
There was none that had anything unknown, unresolved, until the Criches themselves began to appear.
Then her interest was piqued.
Here was something not quite so preconcluded.
There came the mother, Mrs Crich, with her eldest son Gerald.
She was a queer unkempt figure, in spite of the attempts that had obviously been made to bring her into line for the day.
Her face was pale, yellowish, with a clear, transparent skin, she leaned forward rather, her features were strongly marked, handsome, with a tense, unseeing, predative look.
Her colourless hair was untidy, wisps floating down on to her sac coat of dark blue silk, from under her blue silk hat.
She looked like a woman with a monomania, furtive almost, but heavily proud.
Her son was of a fair, sun-tanned type, rather above middle height, well-made, and almost exaggeratedly well-dressed.
But about him also was the strange, guarded look, the unconscious glisten, as if he did not belong to the same creation as the people about him.
Gudrun lighted on him at once. There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice.
And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing.
Perhaps he was thirty years old, perhaps more.
His gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, good-humoured, smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper.
'His totem is the wolf,' she repeated to herself. 'His mother is an old, unbroken wolf.'
And then she experienced a keen paroxyism, a transport, as if she had made some incredible discovery, known to nobody else on earth.
A strange transport took possession of her, all her veins were in a paroxysm of violent sensation.
'Good God!' she exclaimed to herself, 'what is this?'
And then, a moment after, she was saying assuredly,
'I shall know more of that man.'
She was tortured with desire to see him again, a nostalgia, a necessity to see him again, to make sure it was not all a mistake, that she was not deluding herself, that she really felt this strange and overwhelming sensation on his account, this knowledge of him in her essence, this powerful apprehension of him.
'Am I REALLY singled out for him in some way, is there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?' she asked herself.
And she could not believe it, she remained in a muse, scarcely conscious of what was going on around.
The bridesmaids were here, and yet the bridegroom had not come.
Ursula wondered if something was amiss, and if the wedding would yet all go wrong.
She felt troubled, as if it rested upon her.
The chief bridesmaids had arrived.
Ursula watched them come up the steps.
One of them she knew, a tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and a pale, long face.
This was Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches.
Now she came along, with her head held up, balancing an enormous flat hat of pale yellow velvet, on which were streaks of ostrich feathers, natural and grey.
She drifted forward as if scarcely conscious, her long blanched face lifted up, not to see the world.
She was rich.
She wore a dress of silky, frail velvet, of pale yellow colour, and she carried a lot of small rose-coloured cyclamens.
Her shoes and stockings were of brownish grey, like the feathers on her hat, her hair was heavy, she drifted along with a peculiar fixity of the hips, a strange unwilling motion.
She was impressive, in her lovely pale-yellow and brownish-rose, yet macabre, something repulsive.
People were silent when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet for some reason silenced.
Her long, pale face, that she carried lifted up, somewhat in the Rossetti fashion, seemed almost drugged, as if a strange mass of thoughts coiled in the darkness within her, and she was never allowed to escape.
Ursula watched her with fascination.
She knew her a little.
She was the most remarkable woman in the Midlands.