Page 479 - women-in-love

In this extremity his instinct led him to Gudrun. He
threw away everything now—he only wanted the relation
established with her. He would follow her to the studio, to
be near her, to talk to her. He would stand about the room,
aimlessly picking up the implements, the lumps of clay, the
little figures she had cast—they were whimsical and gro-
tesque—looking at them without perceiving them. And she
felt him following her, dogging her heels like a doom. She
held away from him, and yet she knew he drew always a lit-
tle nearer, a little nearer.
‘I say,’ he said to her one evening, in an odd, unthink-
ing, uncertain way, ‘won’t you stay to dinner tonight? I wish
you would.’
She started slightly. He spoke to her like a man making a
request of another man.
‘They’ll be expecting me at home,’ she said.
‘Oh, they won’t mind, will they?’ he said. ‘I should be aw-
fully glad if you’d stay.’
Her long silence gave consent at last.
‘I’ll tell Thomas, shall I?’ he said.
‘I must go almost immediately after dinner,’ she said.
It was a dark, cold evening. There was no fire in the
drawing-room, they sat in the library. He was mostly si-
lent, absent, and Winifred talked little. But when Gerald
did rouse himself, he smiled and was pleasant and ordinary
with her. Then there came over him again the long blanks,
of which he was not aware.
She was very much attracted by him. He looked so pre-
occupied, and his strange, blank silences, which she could

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