Page 641 - women-in-love

Her face was flushed and transfigured. Loerke who was
sitting with his head ducked, like some creature at bay,
looked up at her, swiftly, almost furtively, and murmured,
‘Ja—so ist es, so ist es.’
Ursula was silent after this outburst. She was furious. She
wanted to poke a hole into them both.
‘It isn’t a word of it true, of all this harangue you have
made me,’ she replied flatly. ‘The horse is a picture of your
own stock, stupid brutality, and the girl was a girl you loved
and tortured and then ignored.’
He looked up at her with a small smile of contempt in his
eyes. He would not trouble to answer this last charge.
Gudrun too was silent in exasperated contempt. Ursula
WAS such an insufferable outsider, rushing in where angels
would fear to tread. But then—fools must be suffered, if not
gladly.
But Ursula was persistent too.
‘As for your world of art and your world of reality,’ she re-
plied, ‘you have to separate the two, because you can’t bear
to know what you are. You can’t bear to realise what a stock,
stiff, hide-bound brutality you ARE really, so you say ‘it’s
the world of art.’ The world of art is only the truth about the
real world, that’s all—but you are too far gone to see it.’
She was white and trembling, intent. Gudrun and Loerke
sat in stiff dislike of her. Gerald too, who had come up in the
beginning of the speech, stood looking at her in complete
disapproval and opposition. He felt she was undignified,
she put a sort of vulgarity over the esotericism which gave
man his last distinction. He joined his forces with the other

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