s being. And she was against her mother.

Her father was the dawn wherein her consciousness woke up.
But for him, she might have gone on like the other children,
Gudrun and Theresa and Catherine, one with the flowers and
insects and playthings, having no existence apart from the
concrete object of her attention. But her father came too near
to her. The clasp of his hands and the power of his breast woke
her up almost in pain from the transient unconsciousness of
childhood. Wide-eyed, unseeing, she was awake before she knew
how to see. She was wakened too soon. Too soon the call had come
to her, when she was a small baby, and her father held her close
to his breast, her sleep-living heart was beaten into
wakefulness by the striving of his bigger heart, by his clasping
her to his body for love and for fulfilment, asking as a magnet
must always ask. From her the response had struggled dimly,
vaguely into being.

The children were dressed roughly for the country. When she
was little, Ursula pattered about in little wooden clogs, a blue
overall over her thick red dress, a red shawl crossed on her
breast and tied behind again. So she ran with her father to the
garden.

The household rose early. He was out digging by six o'clock
in the morning, he went to his work at half-past eight. And
Ursula was usually in the garden with him, though not near at
hand.

At Eastertime one year, she helped him to set potatoes. It
was the first time she had ever helped him. The occasion
remained as a picture, one of her earliest memories. They had
gone out soon after dawn. A cold wind was blowing. He had his
old trousers tucked into his boots, he wore no coat nor
waistcoat, his shirt-sleeves fluttered in the wind, his face was
ruddy and intent, in a kind of sleep. When he was at work he
neither heard nor saw. A long, thin man, looking still a youth,
with a line of black moustache above his thick mouth, and his
fine hair blown on his forehead, he worked away at the earth in
the grey first light, alone. His solitariness drew the child
like a spell.

The wind came chill over the dark-green fields. Ursula ran up
and watched him push the setting-peg in at one side of his ready
earth, stride across, and push it in the other side, pulling the
line taut and clear upon the clods intervening. Then with a
sharp cutting noise the bright spade came towards her, cutting a
grip into the new, soft earth.

He struck his spade upright and straightene