Hermione could bear no more.
She rose, saying in her easy sing-song:
'Isn't the evening beautiful!
I get filled sometimes with such a great sense of beauty, that I feel I can hardly bear it.'
Ursula, to whom she had appealed, rose with her, moved to the last impersonal depths.
And Birkin seemed to her almost a monster of hateful arrogance.
She went with Hermione along the bank of the pond, talking of beautiful, soothing things, picking the gentle cowslips.
'Wouldn't you like a dress,' said Ursula to Hermione, 'of this yellow spotted with orange—a cotton dress?'
'Yes,' said Hermione, stopping and looking at the flower, letting the thought come home to her and soothe her. 'Wouldn't it be pretty?
I should LOVE it.'
And she turned smiling to Ursula, in a feeling of real affection.
But Gerald remained with Birkin, wanting to probe him to the bottom, to know what he meant by the dual will in horses.
A flicker of excitement danced on Gerald's face.
Hermione and Ursula strayed on together, united in a sudden bond of deep affection and closeness.
'I really do not want to be forced into all this criticism and analysis of life.
I really DO want to see things in their entirety, with their beauty left to them, and their wholeness, their natural holiness.
Don't you feel it, don't you feel you CAN'T be tortured into any more knowledge?' said Hermione, stopping in front of Ursula, and turning to her with clenched fists thrust downwards.
'Yes,' said Ursula. 'I do.
I am sick of all this poking and prying.'
'I'm so glad you are.
Sometimes,' said Hermione, again stopping arrested in her progress and turning to Ursula, 'sometimes I wonder if I OUGHT to submit to all this realisation, if I am not being weak in rejecting it.
But I feel I CAN'T—I CAN'T.
It seems to destroy EVERYTHING.
All the beauty and the—and the true holiness is destroyed—and I feel I can't live without them.'
'And it would be simply wrong to live without them,' cried Ursula. 'No, it is so IRREVERENT to think that everything must be realised in the head.
Really, something must be left to the Lord, there always is and always will be.'
'Yes,' said Hermione, reassured like a child, 'it should, shouldn't it?
And Rupert—' she lifted her face to the sky, in a muse—'he CAN only tear things to pieces.
He really IS like a boy who must pull everything to pieces to see how it is made.
And I can't think it is right—it does seem so irreverent, as you say.'
'Like tearing open a bud to see what the flower will be like,' said Ursula.
'Yes.
And that kills everything, doesn't it?
It doesn't allow any possibility of flowering.'
'Of course not,' said Ursula. 'It is purely destructive.'
'It is, isn't it!'
Hermione looked long and slow at Ursula, seeming to accept confirmation from her.
Then the two women were silent.
As soon as they were in accord, they began mutually to mistrust each other.
In spite of herself, Ursula felt herself recoiling from Hermione.
It was all she could do to restrain her revulsion.
They returned to the men, like two conspirators who have withdrawn to come to an agreement.
Birkin looked up at them.
Ursula hated him for his cold watchfulness.
But he said nothing.
'Shall we be going?' said Hermione. 'Rupert, you are coming to Shortlands to dinner?
Will you come at once, will you come now, with us?'
'I'm not dressed,' replied Birkin. 'And you know Gerald stickles for convention.'
'I don't stickle for it,' said Gerald. 'But if you'd got as sick as I have of rowdy go-as-you-please in the house, you'd prefer it if people were peaceful and conventional, at least at meals.'
'All right,' said Birkin.