er parents. She was
something else besides the mere daughter of William and Anna
Brangwen. She was independent. She earned her own living. She
was an important member of the working community. She was sure
that fifty shillings a month quite paid for her keep. If her
mother received fifty shillings a month for each of the
children, she would have twenty pounds a month and no clothes to
provide. Very well then.

Ursula was independent of her parents. She now adhered
elsewhere. Now, the 'Board of Education' was a phrase that rang
significant to her, and she felt Whitehall far beyond her as her
ultimate home. In the government, she knew which minister had
supreme control over Education, and it seemed to her that, in
some way, he was connected with her, as her father was connected
with her.

She had another self, another responsibility. She was no
longer Ursula Brangwen, daughter of William Brangwen. She was
also Standard Five teacher in St. Philip's School. And it was a
case now of being Standard Five teacher, and nothing else. For
she could not escape.

Neither could she succeed. That was her horror. As the weeks
passed on, there was no Ursula Brangwen, free and jolly. There
was only a girl of that name obsessed by the fact that she could
not manage her class of children. At week-ends there came days
of passionate reaction, when she went mad with the taste of
liberty, when merely to be free in the morning, to sit down at
her embroidery and stitch the coloured silks was a passion of
delight. For the prison house was always awaiting her! This was
only a respite, as her chained heart knew well. So that she
seized hold of the swift hours of the week-end, and wrung the
last drop of sweetness out of them, in a little, cruel
frenzy.

She did not tell anybody how this state was a torture to her.
She did not confide, either to Gudrun or to her parents, how
horrible she found it to be a school-teacher. But when Sunday
night came, and she felt the Monday morning at hand, she was
strung up tight with dreadful anticipation, because the strain
and the torture was near again.

She did not believe that she could ever teach that great,
brutish class, in that brutal school: ever, ever. And yet, if
she failed, she must in some way go under. She must admit that
the man's world was too strong for her, she could not take her
place in it; she must go down before Mr. Harby. And all her life
henceforth, she must go on, never having free