was a feeling of pure hatred.
There came a stubborn silence. Ursula knew she must break
it.

"Well, they've written to me, and I s'll have to go," she
said.

"Where will you get the money from?" asked her father.

"Uncle Tom will give it me," she said.

Again there was silence. This time she was triumphant.

Then at length her father lifted his head. His face was
abstracted, he seemed to be abstracting himself, to make a pure
statement.

"Well, you're not going all that distance away," he said.
"I'll ask Mr. Burt about a place here. I'm not going to have you
by yourself at the other side of London."

"But I've got to go to Kingston," said Ursula.
"They've sent for me."

"They'll do without you," he said.

There was a trembling silence when she was on the point of
tears.

"Well," she said, low and tense, "you can put me off this,
but I'm going to have a place. I'm not going to
stop at home."

"Nobody wants you to stop at home," he suddenly shouted,
going livid with rage.

She said no more. Her nature had gone hard and smiling in its
own arrogance, in its own antagonistic indifference to the rest
of them. This was the state in which he wanted to kill her. She
went singing into the parlour.

C'est la mere Michel qui a perdu son chat,
Qui cri par la fenetre qu'est-ce qui le lue renda----"

During the next days Ursula went about bright and hard,
singing to herself, making love to the children, but her soul
hard and cold with regard to her parents. Nothing more was said.
The hardness and brightness lasted for four days. Then it began
to break up. So at evening she said to her father:

"Have you spoken about a place for me?"

"I spoke to Mr. Burt."

"What did he say?"

"There's a committee meeting to-morrow. He'll tell me on
Friday."

So she waited till Friday. Kingston-on-Thames had been an
exciting dream. Here she could feel the hard, raw reality. So
she knew that this would come to pass. Because nothing was ever
fulfilled, she found, except in the hard limited reality. She
did not want to be a teacher in Ilkeston, because she knew
Ilkeston, and hated it. But she wanted to be free, so she must
take her freedom where she could.

On Friday her father said there was a place vacant in
Brinsley Street school. This could most probably be secured for
her, at once, without the trouble of application.

Her heart halted. Brinsley Street was a school in a poor
quarter, and she had had a taste o