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boy who was insolent to her, over head and ears and hands. And

at length they were afraid of her, she had them in order.

But she had paid a great price out of her own soul, to do

this. It seemed as if a great flame had gone through her and

burnt her sensitive tissue. She who shrank from the thought of

physical suffering in any form, had been forced to fight and

beat with a cane and rouse all her instincts to hurt. And

afterwards she had been forced to endure the sound of their

blubbering and desolation, when she had broken them to

order.

Oh, and sometimes she felt as if she would go mad. What did

it matter, what did it matter if their books were dirty and they

did not obey? She would rather, in reality, that they disobeyed

the whole rules of the school, than that they should be beaten,

broken, reduced to this crying, hopeless state. She would rather

bear all their insults and insolences a thousand times than

reduce herself and them to this. Bitterly she repented having

got beside herself, and having tackled the boy she had

beaten.

Yet it had to be so. She did not want to do it. Yet she had

to. Oh, why, why had she leagued herself to this evil system

where she must brutalize herself to live? Why had she become a

school-teacher, why, why?

The children had forced her to the beatings. No, she did not

pity them. She had come to them full of kindness and love, and

they would have torn her to pieces. They chose Mr. Harby. Well

then, they must know her as well as Mr. Harby, they must first

be subjugate to her. For she was not going to be made nought,

no, neither by them, nor by Mr. Harby, nor by all the system

around her. She was not going to be put down, prevented from

standing free. It was not to be said of her, she could not take

her place and carry out her task. She would fight and hold her

place in this state also, in the world of work and man's

convention.

She was isolated now from the life of her childhood, a

foreigner in a new life, of work and mechanical consideration.

She and Maggie, in their dinner-hours and their occasional teas

at the little restaurant, discussed life and ideas. Maggie was a

great suffragette, trusting in the vote. To Ursula the vote was

never a reality. She had within her the strange, passionate

knowledge of religion and living far transcending the limits of

the automatic system that contained the vote. But her

fundamental, organic knowledge had as yet to take form and rise

to utterance. For her, as for Maggie, the liberty of woman meant

something real and deep. She felt that somewhere, in something,

she was not free. And she wanted to be. She was in revolt. For

once she were free she could get somewhere. Ah, the wonderful,

real somewhere that was beyond her, the somewhere that she felt

deep, deep inside her.

In coming out and earning her own living she had made a

strong, cruel move towards freeing herself. But having more

freedom she only became more profoundly aware of the big want.

She wanted so many things. She wanted to read great, beautiful

books, and be rich with them; she wanted to see beautiful

things, and have the joy of them for ever; she wanted to know

big, free people; and there remained always the want she could

put no name to.

It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to

meet and surpass. And one never knew where one was going. It was

a blind fight. She had suffered bitterly in this school of St.

Philip's. She was like a young filly that has been broken in to

the shafts, and has lost its freedom. And now she was suffering

bitterly from the agony of the shafts. The agony, the galling,

the ignominy of her breaking in. This wore into her soul. But

she would never submit. To shafts like these she would never

submit for long. But she would know them. She would serve them

that she might destroy them.

She and Maggie went to all kinds of places together, to big

suffrage meetings in Nottingham, to concerts, to theatres, to

exhibitions of pictures. Ursula saved her money and bought a

bicycle, and the two girls rode to Lincoln, to Southwell, and

into Derbyshire. They had an endless wealth of things to talk

about. And it was a great joy, finding, discovering.

But Ursula never told about Winifred Inger. That was a sort

of secret side-show to her life, never to be opened. She did not

even think of it. It was the closed door she had not the

strength to open.

Once she was broken in to her teaching, Ursula began

gradually to have a new life of her own again. She was going to

college in eighteen months' time. Then she would take her

degree, and she would--ah, she would perhaps be a big

woman, and lead a movement. Who knows?--At any rate she

would go to college in eighteen months' time. All that mattered

now was work, work.

And till college, she must go on with this teaching in St.

Philip's School, which was always destroying her, but which she

could now manage, without spoiling all her life. She would

submit to it for a time, since the time had a definite

limit.

The class-teaching itself at last became almost mechanical.

It was a strain on her, an exhausting wearying strain, always

unnatural. But there was a certain amount of pleasure in the

sheer oblivion of teaching, so much work to do, so many children

to see after, so much to be done, that one's self was forgotten.

When the work had become like habit to her, and her individual

soul was left out, had its growth elsewhere, then she could be

almost happy.

Her real, individual self drew together and became more

coherent during these two years of teaching, during the struggle

against the odds of class teaching. It was always a prison to

her, the school. But it was a prison where her wild, chaotic

soul became hard and independent. When she was well enough and

not tired, then she did not hate the teaching. She enjoyed

getting into the swing of work of a morning, putting forth all

her strength, making the thing go. It was for her a strenuous

form of exercise. And her soul was left to rest, it had the time

of torpor in which to gather itself together in strength again.

But the teaching hours were too long, the tasks too heavy, and

the disciplinary condition of the school too unnatural for her.

She was worn very thin and quivering.

She came to school in the morning seeing the hawthorn flowers

wet, the little, rosy grains swimming in a bowl of dew. The

larks quivered their song up into the new sunshine, and the

country was so glad. It was a violation to plunge into the dust

and greyness of the town.

So that she stood before her class unwilling to give herself

up to the activity of teaching, to turn her energy, that longed

for the country and for joy of early summer, into the dominating

of fifty children and the transferring to them some morsels of

arithmetic. There was a little absentness about her. She could

not force herself into forgetfulness. A jar of buttercups and

fool's-parsley in the window-bottom kept her away in the

meadows, where in the lush grass the moon-daisies were

half-submerged, and a spray of pink ragged robin. Yet before her

were faces of fifty children. They were almost like big daisies

in a dimness of the grass.

A brightness was on her face, a little unreality in her

teaching. She could not quite see her children. She was

struggling between two worlds, her own world of young summer and

flowers, and this other world of work. And the glimmer of her

own sunlight was between her and her class.

Then the morning passed with a strange far-awayness and

quietness. Dinner-time came, when she and Maggie ate joyously,

with all the windows open. And then they went out into St.

Philip's churchyard, where was a shadowy corner under red

hawthorn trees. And there they talked and read Shelley or

Browning or some work about "Woman and Labour".

And when she went back to school, Ursula lived still in the

shadowy corner of the graveyard, where pink-red petals lay

scattered from the hawthorn tree, like myriad tiny shells on a

beach, and a church bell sometimes rang sonorously, and

sometimes a bird called out, whilst Maggie's voice went on low

and sweet.

These days she was happy in her soul: oh, she was so happy,

that she wished she could take her joy and scatter it in armfuls

broadcast. She made her children happy, too, with a little

tingling of delight. But to her, the children were not a school

class this afternoon. They were flowers, birds, little bright

animals, children, anything. They only were not Standard Five.

She felt no responsibility for them. It was for once a game,

this teaching. And if they got their sums wrong, what matter?

And she would take a pleasant bit of reading. And instead of

history with dates, she would tell a lovely tale. And for

grammar, they could have a bit of written analysis that was not

difficult, because they had done it before:

"She shall be sportive as a fawn

That wild with glee across the lawn

Or up the mountain springs."

She wrote that from memory, because it pleased her.

So the golden afternoon passed away and she went home happy.

She had finished her day of school, and was free to plunge into

the glowing evening of Cossethay. And she loved walking home.

But it had not been school. It had been playing at school

beneath red hawthorn blossom.

She could not go on like this. The quarterly examination was

coming, and her class was not ready. It irritated her that she

must drag herself away from her happy self, and exert herself

with all her strength to force, to compel this heavy class of

children to work hard at arithmetic. They did not want to work,

she did not want to compel them. And yet, some second conscience

gnawed at her, telling her the work was not properly done. It

irritated her almost to madness, and she let loose all the

irritation in the class. Then followed a day of battle and hate

and violence, when she went home raw, feeling the golden evening

taken away from her, herself incarcerated in some dark, heavy

place, and chained there with a consciousness of having done

badly at work.

What good was it that it was summer, that right till evening,

when the corncrakes called, the larks would mount up into the

light, to sing once more before nightfall. What good was it all,

when she was out of tune, when she must only remember the burden

and shame of school that day.

And still, she hated school. Still she cried, she did not

believe in it. Why should the children learn, and why should she

teach them? It was all so much milling the wind. What folly was

it that made life into this, the fulfilling of some stupid,

factitious duty? It was all so made up, so unnatural. The

school, the sums, the grammar, the quarterly examinations, the

registers--it was all a barren nothing!

Why should she give her allegiance to this world, and let it

so dominate her, that her own world of warm sun and growing,

sap-filled life was turned into nothing? She was not going to do

it. She was not going to be a prisoner in the dry, tyrannical

man-world. She was not going to care about it. What did it

matter if her class did ever so badly in the quarterly

examination. Let it--what did it matter?

Nevertheless, when the time came, and the report on her class

was bad, she was miserable, and the joy of the summer was taken

away from her, she was shut up in gloom. She could not really

escape from this world of system and work, out into her fields

where she was happy. She must have her place in the working

world, be a recognized member with full rights there. It was

more important to her than fields and sun and poetry, at this

time. But she was only the more its enemy.

It was a very difficult thing, she thought, during the long

hours of intermission in the summer holidays, to be herself, her

happy self that enjoyed so much to lie in the sun, to play and

swim and be content, and also to be a school-teacher getting

results out of a class of children. She dreamed fondly of the

time when she need not be a teacher any more. But vaguely, she

knew that responsibility had taken place in her for ever, and as

yet her prime business was to work.

The autumn passed away, the winter was at hand. Ursula became

more and more an inhabitant of the world of work, and of what is

called life. She could not see her future, but a little way off,

was college, and to the thought of this she clung fixedly. She

would go to college, and get her two or three years' training,

free of cost. Already she had applied and had her place

appointed for the coming year.

So she continued to study for her degree. She would take

French, Latin, English, mathematics and botany. She went to

classes in Ilkeston, she studied at evening. For there was this

world to conquer, this knowledge to acquire, this qualification

to attain. And she worked with intensity, because of a want

inside her that drove her on. Almost everything was subordinated

now to this one desire to take her place in the world. What kind

of place it was to be she did not ask herself. The blind desire

drove her on. She must take her place.

She knew she would never be much of a success as an

elementary school teacher. But neither had she failed. She hated

it, but she had managed it.

Maggie had left St. Philip's School, and had found a more

congenial post. The two girls remained friends. They met at

evening classes, they studied and somehow encouraged a firm hope

each in the other. They did not know whither they were making,

nor what they ultimately wanted. But they knew they wanted now

to learn, to know and to do.

They talked of love and marriage, and the position of woman

in marriage. Maggie said that love was the flower of life, and

blossomed unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked

where it was found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its

duration.

To Ursula this was unsatisfactory. She thought she still

loved Anton Skrebensky. But she did not forgive him that he had