was out
there. He sent her an occasional post-card. But it was as if she
were a blank wall in his direction, without windows or outgoing.
She adhered to the Skrebensky of her memory.

Her love for Winifred Inger wrenched her life as it seemed
from the roots and native soil where Skrebensky had belonged to
it, and she was aridly transplanted. He was really only a
memory. She revived his memory with strange passion, after the
departure of Winifred. He was to her almost the symbol of her
real life. It was as if, through him, in him, she might return
to her own self, which she was before she had loved Winifred,
before this deadness had come upon her, this pitiless
transplanting. But even her memories were the work of her
imagination.

She dreamed of him and her as they had been together. She
could not dream of him progressively, of what he was doing now,
of what relation he would have to her now. Only sometimes she
wept to think how cruelly she had suffered when he left
her--ah, how she had suffered! She remembered what
she had written in her diary:

"If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down."

Ah, it was a dull agony to her to remember what she had been
then. For it was remembering a dead self. All that was dead
after Winifred. She knew the corpse of her young, loving self,
she knew its grave. And the young living self she mourned for
had scarcely existed, it was the creature of her
imagination.

Deep within her a cold despair remained unchanging and
unchanged. No one would ever love her now--she would love
no one. The body of love was killed in her after Winifred, there
was something of the corpse in her. She would live, she would go
on, but she would have no lovers, no lover would want her any
more. She herself would want no lover. The vividest little flame
of desire was extinct in her for ever. The tiny, vivid germ that
contained the bud of her real self, her real love, was killed,
she would go on growing as a plant, she would do her best to
produce her minor flowers, but her leading flower was dead
before it was born, all her growth was the conveying of a corpse
of hope.

The miserable weeks went on, in the poky house crammed with
children. What was her life--a sordid, formless,
disintegrated nothing; Ursula Brangwen a person without worth or
importance, living in the mean village of Cossethay, within the
sordid scope of Ilkeston. Ursula Brangwen, at seventeen,
worthless and unvalued, neither wa