he moonlight between the fires; then the time she could not
think of without being blasted, Winifred Inger, and the months
before becoming a school-teacher; then the horrors of Brinsley
Street, lapsing into comparative peacefulness, Maggie, and
Maggie's brother, whose influence she could still feel in her
veins, when she conjured him up; then college, and Dorothy
Russell, who was now in France, then the next move into the
world again!

Already it was a history. In every phase she was so
different. Yet she was always Ursula Brangwen. But what did it
mean, Ursula Brangwen? She did not know what she was. Only she
was full of rejection, of refusal. Always, always she was
spitting out of her mouth the ash and grit of disillusion, of
falsity. She could only stiffen in rejection, in rejection. She
seemed always negative in her action.

That which she was, positively, was dark and unrevealed, it
could not come forth. It was like a seed buried in dry ash. This
world in which she lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp.
This lighted area, lit up by man's completest consciousness, she
thought was all the world: that here all was disclosed for ever.
Yet all the time, within the darkness she had been aware of
points of light, like the eyes of wild beasts, gleaming,
penetrating, vanishing. And her soul had acknowledged in a great
heave of terror only the outer darkness. This inner circle of
light in which she lived and moved, wherein the trains rushed
and the factories ground out their machine-produce and the
plants and the animals worked by the light of science and
knowledge, suddenly it seemed like the area under an arc-lamp,
wherein the moths and children played in the security of
blinding light, not even knowing there was any darkness, because
they stayed in the light.

But she could see the glimmer of dark movement just out of
range, she saw the eyes of the wild beast gleaming from the
darkness, watching the vanity of the camp fire and the sleepers;
she felt the strange, foolish vanity of the camp, which said
"Beyond our light and our order there is nothing," turning their
faces always inward towards the sinking fire of illuminating
consciousness, which comprised sun and stars, and the Creator,
and the System of Righteousness, ignoring always the vast
darkness that wheeled round about, with half-revealed shapes
lurking on the edge.

Yea, and no man dared even throw a firebrand into the
darkness. For if he did he was j