Page 639 - women-in-love

‘Green bronze!’ repeated Gudrun, coldly accepting his
challenge. She was thinking of the slender, immature, ten-
der limbs of the girl, smooth and cold in green bronze.
‘Yes, beautiful,’ she murmured, looking up at him with a
certain dark homage.
He closed his eyes and looked aside, triumphant.
‘Why,’ said Ursula, ‘did you make the horse so stiff? It is
as stiff as a block.’
‘Stiff?’ he repeated, in arms at once.
‘Yes. LOOK how stock and stupid and brutal it is. Horses
are sensitive, quite delicate and sensitive, really.’
He raised his shoulders, spread his hands in a shrug of
slow indifference, as much as to inform her she was an ama-
teur and an impertinent nobody.
‘Wissen Sie,’ he said, with an insulting patience and con-
descension in his voice, ‘that horse is a certain FORM, part
of a whole form. It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It
is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump
of sugar, do you see—it is part of a work of art, it has no re-
lation to anything outside that work of art.’
Ursula, angry at being treated quite so insultingly DE
HAUT EN BAS, from the height of esoteric art to the depth
of general exoteric amateurism, replied, hotly, flushing and
lifting her face.
‘But it IS a picture of a horse, nevertheless.’
He lifted his shoulders in another shrug.
‘As you like—it is not a picture of a cow, certainly.’
Here Gudrun broke in, flushed and brilliant, anxious to
avoid any more of this, any more of Ursula’s foolish persis-

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