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strange, false sunshine of hope in life, something seemed to
snap in her, and a terrible cynicism began to gain upon her,
blowing in like a wind. Everything turned to irony with her:
the last flavour of everything was ironical. When she felt her
pang of undeniable reality, this was when she knew the hard
irony of hopes and ideas.
She lay and looked at him, as he slept. He was sheerly
beautiful, he was a perfect instrument. To her mind, he was
a pure, inhuman, almost superhuman instrument. His in-
strumentality appealed so strongly to her, she wished she
were God, to use him as a tool.
And at the same instant, came the ironical question:
‘What for?’ She thought of the colliers’ wives, with their
linoleum and their lace curtains and their little girls in
high-laced boots. She thought of the wives and daughters
of the pit-managers, their tennis-parties, and their terrible
struggles to be superior each to the other, in the social scale.
There was Shortlands with its meaningless distinction, the
meaningless crowd of the Criches. There was London, the
House of Commons, the extant social world. My God!
Young as she was, Gudrun had touched the whole pulse
of social England. She had no ideas of rising in the world.
She knew, with the perfect cynicism of cruel youth, that to
rise in the world meant to have one outside show instead of
another, the advance was like having a spurious half-crown
instead of a spurious penny. The whole coinage of valuation
was spurious. Yet of course, her cynicism knew well enough
that, in a world where spurious coin was current, a bad sov-
ereign was better than a bad farthing. But rich and poor, she

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