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not been strong enough to acknowledge her. He had denied her.

How then could she love him? How then was love so absolute? She

did not believe it. She believed that love was a way, a means,

not an end in itself, as Maggie seemed to think. And always the

way of love would be found. But whither did it lead?

"I believe there are many men in the world one might

love--there is not only one man," said Ursula.

She was thinking of Skrebensky. Her heart was hollow with the

knowledge of Winifred Inger.

"But you must distinguish between love and passion," said

Maggie, adding, with a touch of contempt: "Men will easily have

a passion for you, but they won't love you."

"Yes," said Ursula, vehemently, the look of suffering, almost

of fanaticism, on her face. "Passion is only part of love. And

it seems so much because it can't last. That is why passion is

never happy."

She was staunch for joy, for happiness, and permanency, in

contrast with Maggie, who was for sadness, and the inevitable

passing-away of things. Ursula suffered bitterly at the hands of

life, Maggie was always single, always withheld, so she went in

a heavy brooding sadness that was almost meat to her. In

Ursula's last winter at St. Philip's the friendship of the two

girls came to a climax. It was during this winter that Ursula

suffered and enjoyed most keenly Maggie's fundamental sadness of

enclosedness. Maggie enjoyed and suffered Ursula's struggles

against the confines of her life. And then the two girls began

to drift apart, as Ursula broke from that form of life wherein

Maggie must remain enclosed.

CHAPTER XIV

THE WIDENING CIRCLE

Maggie's people, the Schofields, lived in the large

gardener's cottage, that was half a farm, behind Belcote Hall.

The hall was too damp to live in, so the Schofields were

caretakers, gamekeepers, farmers, all in one. The father was

gamekeeper and stock-breeder, the eldest son was

market-gardener, using the big hall gardens, the second son was

farmer and gardener. There was a large family, as at

Cossethay.

Ursula loved to stay at Belcote, to be treated as a grand

lady by Maggie's brothers. They were good-looking men. The

eldest was twenty-six years old. He was the gardener, a man not

very tall, but strong and well made, with brown, sunny, easy

eyes and a face handsomely hewn, brown, with a long fair

moustache which he pulled as he talked to Ursula.

The girl was excited because these men attended to her when

she came near. She could make their eyes light up and quiver,

she could make Anthony, the eldest, twist and twist his

moustache. She knew she could move them almost at will with her

light laughter and chatter. They loved her ideas, watched her as

she talked vehemently about politics or economics. And she,

while she talked, saw the golden-brown eyes of Anthony gleam

like the eyes of a satyr as they watched her. He did not listen

to her words, he listened to her. It excited her.

He was like a faun pleased when she would go with him over

his hothouses, to look at the green and pretty plants, at the

pink primulas nodding among their leaves, and cinarrias

flaunting purple and crimson and white. She asked about

everything, and he told her very exactly and minutely, in a

queer pedantic way that made her want to laugh. Yet she was

really interested in what he did. And he had the curious light

in his face, like the light in the eyes of the goat that was

tethered by the farmyard gate.

She went down with him into the warmish cellar, where already

in the darkness the little yellow knobs of rhubarb were coming.

He held the lantern down to the dark earth. She saw the tiny

knob-end of the rhubarb thrusting upwards upon the thick red

stem, thrusting itself like a knob of flame through the soft

soil. His face was turned up to her, the light glittered on his

eyes and his teeth as he laughed, with a faint, musical neigh.

He looked handsome. And she heard a new sound in her ears, the

faintly-musical, neighing laugh of Anthony, whose moustache

twisted up, and whose eyes were luminous with a cold, steady,

arrogant-laughing glare. There seemed a little prance of triumph

in his movement, she could not rid herself of a movement of

acquiescence, a touch of acceptance. Yet he was so humble, his

voice was so caressing. He held his hand for her to step on when

she must climb a wall. And she stepped on the living firmness of

him, that quivered firmly under her weight.

She was aware of him as if in a mesmeric state. In her

ordinary sense, she had nothing to do with him. But the peculiar

ease and unnoticeableness of his entering the house, the power

of his cold, gleaming light on her when he looked at her, was

like a bewitchment. In his eyes, as in the pale grey eyes of a

goat, there seemed some of that steady, hard fire of moonlight

which has nothing to do with the day. It made her alert, and yet

her mind went out like an extinguished thing. She was all

senses, all her senses were alive.

Then she saw him on Sunday, dressed up in Sunday clothes,

trying to impress her. And he looked ridiculous. She clung to

the ridiculous effect of his stiff, Sunday clothes.

She was always conscious of some unfaithfulness to Maggie, on

Anthony's score. Poor Maggie stood apart as if betrayed. Maggie

and Anthony were enemies by instinct. Ursula had to go back to

her friend brimming with affection and a poignancy of pity.

Which Maggie received with a little stiffness. Then poetry and

books and learning took the place of Anthony, with his goats'

movements and his cold, gleaming humour.

While Ursula was at Belcote, the snow fell. In the morning, a

covering of snow weighed on the rhododendron bushes.

"Shall we go out?" said Maggie.

She had lost some of her leader's sureness, and was now

tentative, a little in reserve from her friend.

They took the key of the gate and wandered into the park. It

was a white world on which dark trees and tree masses stood

under a sky keen with frost. The two girls went past the hall,

that was shuttered and silent, their footprints marking the snow

on the drive. Down the park, a long way off, a man was carrying

armfuls of hay across the snow. He was a small, dark figure,

like an animal moving in its unawareness.

Ursula and Maggie went on exploring, down to a tinkling,

chilly brook, that had worn the snow away in little scoops, and

ran dark between. They saw a robin glance its bright eyes and

burst scarlet and grey into the hedge, then some pertly-marked

blue-tits scuffled. Meanwhile the brook slid on coldly,

chuckling to itself.

The girls wandered across the snowy grass to where the

artificial fish-ponds lay under thin ice. There was a big tree

with a thick trunk twisted with ivy, that hung almost horizontal

over the ponds. Ursula climbed joyfully into this and sat amid

bosses of bright ivy and dull berries. Some ivy leaves were like

green spears held out, and tipped with snow. The ice was seen

beneath them.

Maggie took out a book, and sitting lower down the trunk

began to read Coleridge's "Christabel". Ursula half listened.

She was wildly thrilled. Then she saw Anthony coming across the

snow, with his confident, slightly strutting stride. His face

looked brown and hard against the snow, smiling with a sort of

tense confidence.

"Hello!" she called to him.

A response went over his face, his head was lifted in an

answering, jerking gesture.

"Hello!" he said. "You're like a bird in there."

And Ursula's laugh rang out. She answered to the peculiar,

reedy twang in his penetrating voice.

She did not think of Anthony, yet she lived in a sort of

connection with him, in his world. One evening she met him as

she was coming down the lane, and they walked side by side.

"I think it's so lovely here," she cried.

"Do you?" he said. "I'm glad you like it."

There was a curious confidence in his voice.

"Oh, I love it. What more does one want than to live in this

beautiful place, and make things grow in your garden. It is like

the Garden of Eden."

"Is it?" he said, with a little laugh. "Yes--well, it's

not so bad----" he was hesitating. The pale gleam was

strong in his eyes, he was looking at her steadily, watching

her, as an animal might. Something leaped in her soul. She knew

he was going to suggest to her that she should be as he was.

"Would you like to stay here with me?" he asked,

tentatively.

She blenched with fear and with the intense sensation of

proffered licence suggested to her.

They had come to the gate.

"How?" she asked. "You aren't alone here."

"We could marry," he answered, in the strange,

coldly-gleaming insinuating tone that chilled the sunshine into

moonlight. All substantial things seemed transformed. Shadows

and dancing moonlight were real, and all cold, inhuman, gleaming

sensations. She realized with something like terror that she was

going to accept this. She was going inevitably to accept him.

His hand was reaching out to the gate before them. She stood

still. His flesh was hard and brown and final. She seemed to be

in the grip of some insult.

"I couldn't," she answered, involuntarily.

He gave the same brief, neighing little laugh, very sad and

bitter now, and slotted back the bar of the gate. Yet he did not

open. For a moment they both stood looking at the fire of sunset

that quivered among the purple twigs of the trees. She saw his

brown, hard, well-hewn face gleaming with anger and humiliation

and submission. He was an animal that knows that it is subdued.

Her heart flamed with sensation of him, of the fascinating thing

he offered her, and with sorrow, and with an inconsolable sense

of loneliness. Her soul was an infant crying in the night. He

had no soul. Oh, and why had she? He was the cleaner.

She turned away, she turned round from him, and saw the east

flushed strangely rose, the moon coming yellow and lovely upon a

rosy sky, above the darkening, bluish snow. All this so

beautiful, all this so lovely! He did not see it. He was one

with it. But she saw it, and was one with it. Her seeing

separated them infinitely.

They went on in silence down the path, following their

different fates. The trees grew darker and darker, the snow made

only a dimness in an unreal world. And like a shadow, the day

had gone into a faintly luminous, snowy evening, while she was

talking aimlessly to him, to keep him at a distance, yet to keep

him near her, and he walked heavily. He opened the garden gate

for her quietly, and she was entering into her own pleasances,

leaving him outside the gate.

Then even whilst she was escaping, or trying to escape, this

feeling of pain, came Maggie the next day, saying:

"I wouldn't make Anthony love you, Ursula, if you don't want

him. It is not nice."

"But, Maggie, I never made him love me," cried Ursula,

dismayed and suffering, and feeling as if she had done something

base.

She liked Anthony, though. All her life, at intervals, she

returned to the thought of him and of that which he offered. But

she was a traveller, she was a traveller on the face of the

earth, and he was an isolated creature living in the fulfilment

of his own senses.

She could not help it, that she was a traveller. She knew

Anthony, that he was not one. But oh, ultimately and finally,

she must go on and on, seeking the goal that she knew she did

draw nearer to.

She was wearing away her second and last cycle at St.

Philip's. As the months went she ticked them off, first October,

then November, December, January. She was careful always to

subtract a month from the remainder, for the summer holidays.

She saw herself travelling round a circle, only an arc of which

remained to complete. Then, she was in the open, like a bird

tossed into mid-air, a bird that had learned in some measure to

fly.

There was college ahead; that was her mid-air, unknown,

spacious. Come college, and she would have broken from the

confines of all the life she had known. For her father was also

going to move. They were all going to leave Cossethay.

Brangwen had kept his carelessness about his circumstances.

He knew his work in the lace designing meant little to him

personally, he just earned his wage by it. He did not know what

meant much to him. Living close to Anna Brangwen, his mind was

always suffused through with physical heat, he moved from

instinct to instinct, groping, always groping on.

When it was suggested to him that he might apply for one of

the posts as hand-work instructor, posts about to be created by

the Nottingham Education Committee, it was as if a space had

been given to him, into which he could remove from his hot,

dusky enclosure. He sent in his application, confidently,

expectantly. He had a sort of belief in his supernatural fate.

The inevitable weariness of his daily work had stiffened some of

his muscles, and made a slight deadness in his ruddy, alert

face. Now he might escape.

He was full of the new possibilities, and his wife was

acquiescent. She was willing now to have a change. She too was

tired of Cossethay. The house was too small for the growing

children. And since she was nearly forty years old, she began to

come awake from her sleep of motherhood, her energy moved more

outwards. The din of growing lives roused her from her apathy.

She too must have her hand in making life. She was quite ready

to move, taking all her brood. It would be better now if she

transplanted them. For she had borne her last child, it would be

growing up.

So that in her easy, unused fashion she talked plans and

arrangements with her husband, indifferent really as to the

method of the change, since a change was coming; even if it did

not come in this way it would come in another.