vity made sordid by barren cohesion with the rest of the
small activities. Farther off was the great colliery that went
night and day. And all around was the country, green with two
winding streams, ragged with gorse, and heath, the darker woods
in the distance.

The whole place was just unreal, just unreal. Even now, when
he had been there for two years, Tom Brangwen did not believe in
the actuality of the place. It was like some gruesome dream,
some ugly, dead, amorphous mood become concrete.

Ursula and Winifred were met by the motor-car at the raw
little station, and drove through what seemed to them like the
horrible raw beginnings of something. The place was a moment of
chaos perpetuated, persisting, chaos fixed and rigid. Ursula was
fascinated by the many men who were there--groups of men
standing in the streets, four or five men walking in a gang
together, their dogs running behind or before. They were all
decently dressed, and most of them rather gaunt. The terrible
gaunt repose of their bearing fascinated her. Like creatures
with no more hope, but which still live and have passionate
being, within some utterly unliving shell, they passed
meaninglessly along, with strange, isolated dignity. It was as
if a hard, horny shell enclosed them all.

Shocked and startled, Ursula was carried to her Uncle Tom's
house. He was not yet at home. His house was simply, but well
furnished. He had taken out a dividing wall, and made the whole
front of the house into a large library, with one end devoted to
his science. It was a handsome room, appointed as a laboratory
and reading room, but giving the same sense of hard, mechanical
activity, activity mechanical yet inchoate, and looking out on
the hideous abstraction of the town, and at the green meadows
and rough country beyond, and at the great, mathematical
colliery on the other side.

They saw Tom Brangwen walking up the curved drive. He was
getting stouter, but with his bowler hat worn well set down on
his brows, he looked manly, handsome, curiously like any other
man of action. His colour was as fresh, his health as perfect as
ever, he walked like a man rather absorbed.

Winifred Inger was startled when he entered the library, his
coat fastened and correct, his head bald to the crown, but not
shiny, rather like something naked that one is accustomed to see
covered, and his dark eyes liquid and formless. He seemed to
stand in the shadow, like a thing ashamed. And th