of the
situation and causing a friction of dislike to go over Gudrun's nerves.

As she went upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of her home round
about her. And she loathed it, the sordid, too-familiar place! She was
afraid at the depth of her feeling against the home, the milieu, the
whole atmosphere and condition of this obsolete life. Her feeling
frightened her.

The two girls were soon walking swiftly down the main road of Beldover,
a wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and
sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and
Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery
town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid
gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed
to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was
strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the full
effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why had she
wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to submit herself to
it, the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this
defaced countryside? She felt like a beetle toiling in the dust. She
was filled with repulsion.

They turned off the main road, past a black patch of common-garden,
where sooty cabbage stumps stood shameless. No one thought to be
ashamed. No one was ashamed of it all.

'It is like a country in an underworld,' said Gudrun. 'The colliers
bring it above-ground with them, shovel it up. Ursula, it's marvellous,
it's really marvellous--it's really wonderful, another world. The
people are all ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything is a
ghoulish replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled,
everything sordid. It's like being mad, Ursula.'

The sisters were crossing a black path through a dark, soiled field. On
the left was a large landscape, a valley with collieries, and opposite
hills with cornfields and woods, all blackened with distance, as if
seen through a veil of crape. White and black smoke rose up in steady
columns, magic within the dark air. Near at hand came the long rows of
dwellings, approaching curved up the hill-slope, in straight lines
along the brow of the hill. They were of darkened red brick, brittle,
with dark slate roofs. The path on which the sisters walked was black,
trodden-in by the feet of the recurrent colliers, and bounded from the
field by iron fences; the sti