ttled, almost degraded.

There was over the house a kind of dark silence and
intensity, in which passion worked its inevitable conclusions.
There was in the house a sort of richness, a deep, inarticulate
interchange which made other places seem thin and unsatisfying.
Brangwen could sit silent, smoking in his chair, the mother
could move about in her quiet, insidious way, and the sense of
the two presences was powerful, sustaining. The whole
intercourse was wordless, intense and close.

But Anna was uneasy. She wanted to get away. Yet wherever she
went, there came upon her that feeling of thinness, as if she
were made smaller, belittled. She hastened home.

There she raged and interrupted the strong, settled
interchange. Sometimes her mother turned on her with a fierce,
destructive anger, in which was no pity or consideration. And
Anna shrank, afraid. She went to her father.

He would still listen to the spoken word, which fell sterile
on the unheeding mother. Sometimes Anna talked to her father.
She tried to discuss people, she wanted to know what was meant.
But her father became uneasy. He did not want to have things
dragged into consciousness. Only out of consideration for her he
listened. And there was a kind of bristling rousedness in the
room. The cat got up and stretching itself, went uneasily to the
door. Mrs. Brangwen was silent, she seemed ominous. Anna could
not go on with her fault-finding, her criticism, her expression
of dissatisfactions. She felt even her father against her. He
had a strong, dark bond with her mother, a potent intimacy that
existed inarticulate and wild, following its own course, and
savage if interrupted, uncovered.

Nevertheless Brangwen was uneasy about the girl, the whole
house continued to be disturbed. She had a pathetic, baffled
appeal. She was hostile to her parents, even whilst she lived
entirely with them, within their spell.

Many ways she tried, of escape. She became an assiduous
church-goer. But the language meant nothing to her: it
seemed false. She hated to hear things expressed, put into
words. Whilst the religious feelings were inside her they were
passionately moving. In the mouth of the clergyman, they were
false, indecent. She tried to read. But again the tedium and the
sense of the falsity of the spoken word put her off. She went to
stay with girl friends. At first she thought it splendid. But
then the inner boredom came on, it seemed to her all
nothingness.