a black,
open eye, which perhaps was looking at them, perhaps was not, it
hobbled calmly forward and began to nibble the grass with that mean
motion of a rabbit's quick eating.

'It's mad,' said Gudrun. 'It is most decidedly mad.'

He laughed.

'The question is,' he said, 'what is madness? I don't suppose it is
rabbit-mad.'

'Don't you think it is?' she asked.

'No. That's what it is to be a rabbit.'

There was a queer, faint, obscene smile over his face. She looked at
him and saw him, and knew that he was initiate as she was initiate.
This thwarted her, and contravened her, for the moment.

'God be praised we aren't rabbits,' she said, in a high, shrill voice.

The smile intensified a little, on his face.

'Not rabbits?' he said, looking at her fixedly.

Slowly her face relaxed into a smile of obscene recognition.

'Ah Gerald,' she said, in a strong, slow, almost man-like way. '-All
that, and more.' Her eyes looked up at him with shocking nonchalance.

He felt again as if she had torn him across the breast, dully, finally.
He turned aside.

'Eat, eat my darling!' Winifred was softly conjuring the rabbit, and
creeping forward to touch it. It hobbled away from her. 'Let its mother
stroke its fur then, darling, because it is so mysterious-'

CHAPTER XIX.

MOONY

After his illness Birkin went to the south of France for a time. He did
not write, nobody heard anything of him. Ursula, left alone, felt as if
everything were lapsing out. There seemed to be no hope in the world.
One was a tiny little rock with the tide of nothingness rising higher
and higher She herself was real, and only herself--just like a rock in
a wash of flood-water. The rest was all nothingness. She was hard and
indifferent, isolated in herself.

There was nothing for it now, but contemptuous, resistant indifference.
All the world was lapsing into a grey wish-wash of nothingness, she had
no contact and no connection anywhere. She despised and detested the
whole show. From the bottom of her heart, from the bottom of her soul,
she despised and detested people, adult people. She loved only children
and animals: children she loved passionately, but coldly. They made her
want to hug them, to protect them, to give them life. But this very
love, based on pity and despair, was only a bondage and a pain to her.
She loved best of all the animals, that were single and unsocial as she
herself was. She loved the horses and cows in the fie