a's. But in his pale, elegant, serious face there showed
the same nostalgia that Gudrun felt. He too must walk up and down the
street on Friday evening. So he walked with Gudrun, and a friendship
was struck up between them. But he was not in love with Gudrun; he
REALLY wanted Ursula, but for some strange reason, nothing could happen
between her and him. He liked to have Gudrun about, as a
fellow-mind--but that was all. And she had no real feeling for him. He
was a scientist, he had to have a woman to back him. But he was really
impersonal, he had the fineness of an elegant piece of machinery. He
was too cold, too destructive to care really for women, too great an
egoist. He was polarised by the men. Individually he detested and
despised them. In the mass they fascinated him, as machinery fascinated
him. They were a new sort of machinery to him--but incalculable,
incalculable.

So Gudrun strolled the streets with Palmer, or went to the cinema with
him. And his long, pale, rather elegant face flickered as he made his
sarcastic remarks. There they were, the two of them: two elegants in
one sense: in the other sense, two units, absolutely adhering to the
people, teeming with the distorted colliers. The same secret seemed to
be working in the souls of all alike, Gudrun, Palmer, the rakish young
bloods, the gaunt, middle-aged men. All had a secret sense of power,
and of inexpressible destructiveness, and of fatal half-heartedness, a
sort of rottenness in the will.

Sometimes Gudrun would start aside, see it all, see how she was sinking
in. And then she was filled with a fury of contempt and anger. She felt
she was sinking into one mass with the rest--all so close and
intermingled and breathless. It was horrible. She stifled. She prepared
for flight, feverishly she flew to her work. But soon she let go. She
started off into the country--the darkish, glamorous country. The spell
was beginning to work again.

CHAPTER X.

SKETCH-BOOK

One morning the sisters were sketching by the side of Willey Water, at
the remote end of the lake. Gudrun had waded out to a gravelly shoal,
and was seated like a Buddhist, staring fixedly at the water-plants
that rose succulent from the mud of the low shores. What she could see
was mud, soft, oozy, watery mud, and from its festering chill,
water-plants rose up, thick and cool and fleshy, very straight and
turgid, thrusting out their leaves at right angles, and having dark
lurid colou