Page 575 - women-in-love

CHAPTER XXIX

CONTINENTAL

Ursula went on in an unreal suspense, the last weeks be-
fore going away. She was not herself,—she was not anything.
She was something that is going to be—soon—soon—very
soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.
She went to see her parents. It was a rather stiff, sad meet-
ing, more like a verification of separateness than a reunion.
But they were all vague and indefinite with one another,
stiffened in the fate that moved them apart.
She did not really come to until she was on the ship
crossing from Dover to Ostend. Dimly she had come down
to London with Birkin, London had been a vagueness, so
had the train-journey to Dover. It was all like a sleep.
And now, at last, as she stood in the stern of the ship, in
a pitch-dark, rather blowy night, feeling the motion of the
sea, and watching the small, rather desolate little lights that
twinkled on the shores of England, as on the shores of no-
where, watched them sinking smaller and smaller on the
profound and living darkness, she felt her soul stirring to
awake from its anaesthetic sleep.
‘Let us go forward, shall we?’ said Birkin. He wanted to
be at the tip of their projection. So they left off looking at
the faint sparks that glimmered out of nowhere, in the far

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