'I believe in the unseen hosts,' he said.
'And nothing else?
You believe in nothing visible, except grass and birds?
Your world is a poor show.'
'Perhaps it is,' he said, cool and superior now he was offended, assuming a certain insufferable aloof superiority, and withdrawing into his distance.
Ursula disliked him.
But also she felt she had lost something.
She looked at him as he sat crouched on the bank.
There was a certain priggish Sunday-school stiffness over him, priggish and detestable.
And yet, at the same time, the moulding of him was so quick and attractive, it gave such a great sense of freedom: the moulding of his brows, his chin, his whole physique, something so alive, somewhere, in spite of the look of sickness.
And it was this duality in feeling which he created in her, that made a fine hate of him quicken in her bowels. There was his wonderful, desirable life-rapidity, the rare quality of an utterly desirable man: and there was at the same time this ridiculous, mean effacement into a Salvator Mundi and a Sunday-school teacher, a prig of the stiffest type.
He looked up at her.
He saw her face strangely enkindled, as if suffused from within by a powerful sweet fire.
His soul was arrested in wonder.
She was enkindled in her own living fire.
Arrested in wonder and in pure, perfect attraction, he moved towards her.
She sat like a strange queen, almost supernatural in her glowing smiling richness.
'The point about love,' he said, his consciousness quickly adjusting itself, 'is that we hate the word because we have vulgarised it.
It ought to be prescribed, tabooed from utterance, for many years, till we get a new, better idea.'
There was a beam of understanding between them.
'But it always means the same thing,' she said.
'Ah God, no, let it not mean that any more,' he cried. 'Let the old meanings go.'
'But still it is love,' she persisted.
A strange, wicked yellow light shone at him in her eyes.
He hesitated, baffled, withdrawing.
'No,' he said, 'it isn't.
Spoken like that, never in the world.
You've no business to utter the word.'
'I must leave it to you, to take it out of the Ark of the Covenant at the right moment,' she mocked.
Again they looked at each other.
She suddenly sprang up, turned her back to him, and walked away.
He too rose slowly and went to the water's edge, where, crouching, he began to amuse himself unconsciously.
Picking a daisy he dropped it on the pond, so that the stem was a keel, the flower floated like a little water lily, staring with its open face up to the sky.
It turned slowly round, in a slow, slow Dervish dance, as it veered away.
He watched it, then dropped another daisy into the water, and after that another, and sat watching them with bright, absolved eyes, crouching near on the bank.
Ursula turned to look.
A strange feeling possessed her, as if something were taking place.
But it was all intangible.
And some sort of control was being put on her.
She could not know.
She could only watch the brilliant little discs of the daisies veering slowly in travel on the dark, lustrous water.
The little flotilla was drifting into the light, a company of white specks in the distance.
'Do let us go to the shore, to follow them,' she said, afraid of being any longer imprisoned on the island.
And they pushed off in the punt.
She was glad to be on the free land again.
She went along the bank towards the sluice.
The daisies were scattered broadcast on the pond, tiny radiant things, like an exaltation, points of exaltation here and there.
Why did they move her so strongly and mystically?
'Look,' he said, 'your boat of purple paper is escorting them, and they are a convoy of rafts.'
Some of the daisies came slowly towards her, hesitating, making a shy bright little cotillion on the dark clear water.