Page 626 - women-in-love

there must be something better than they had known. And
he found what he desired, a perfect long, fierce sweep, sheer-
ing past the foot of a rock and into the trees at the base. It
was dangerous, he knew. But then he knew also he would
direct the sledge between his fingers.
The first days passed in an ecstasy of physical motion,
sleighing, skiing, skating, moving in an intensity of speed
and white light that surpassed life itself, and carried the
souls of the human beings beyond into an inhuman ab-
straction of velocity and weight and eternal, frozen snow.
Gerald’s eyes became hard and strange, and as he went
by on his skis he was more like some powerful, fateful sigh
than a man, his muscles elastic in a perfect, soaring trajec-
tory, his body projected in pure flight, mindless, soulless,
whirling along one perfect line of force.
Luckily there came a day of snow, when they must all
stay indoors: otherwise Birkin said, they would all lose their
faculties, and begin to utter themselves in cries and shrieks,
like some strange, unknown species of snow-creatures.
It happened in the afternoon that Ursula sat in the
Reunionsaal talking to Loerke. The latter had seemed un-
happy lately. He was lively and full of mischievous humour,
as usual.
But Ursula had thought he was sulky about something.
His partner, too, the big, fair, good-looking youth, was ill at
ease, going about as if he belonged to nowhere, and was kept
in some sort of subjection, against which he was rebelling.
Loerke had hardly talked to Gudrun. His associate, on
the other hand, had paid her constantly a soft, over-defer-

626 Women in Love