flickered on Gudrun's face.

'Doesn't he feel important?' smiled Gudrun.

'Doesn't he!' exclaimed Ursula, with a little ironical grimace. 'Isn't
he a little Lloyd George of the air!'

'Isn't he! Little Lloyd George of the air! That's just what they are,'
cried Gudrun in delight. Then for days, Ursula saw the persistent,
obtrusive birds as stout, short politicians lifting up their voices
from the platform, little men who must make themselves heard at any
cost.

But even from this there came the revulsion. Some yellowhammers
suddenly shot along the road in front of her. And they looked to her so
uncanny and inhuman, like flaring yellow barbs shooting through the air
on some weird, living errand, that she said to herself: 'After all, it
is impudence to call them little Lloyd Georges. They are really unknown
to us, they are the unknown forces. It is impudence to look at them as
if they were the same as human beings. They are of another world. How
stupid anthropomorphism is! Gudrun is really impudent, insolent, making
herself the measure of everything, making everything come down to human
standards. Rupert is quite right, human beings are boring, painting the
universe with their own image. The universe is non-human, thank God.'
It seemed to her irreverence, destructive of all true life, to make
little Lloyd Georges of the birds. It was such a lie towards the
robins, and such a defamation. Yet she had done it herself. But under
Gudrun's influence: so she exonerated herself.

So she withdrew away from Gudrun and from that which she stood for, she
turned in spirit towards Birkin again. She had not seen him since the
fiasco of his proposal. She did not want to, because she did not want
the question of her acceptance thrust upon her. She knew what Birkin
meant when he asked her to marry him; vaguely, without putting it into
speech, she knew. She knew what kind of love, what kind of surrender he
wanted. And she was not at all sure that this was the kind of love that
she herself wanted. She was not at all sure that it was this mutual
unison in separateness that she wanted. She wanted unspeakable
intimacies. She wanted to have him, utterly, finally to have him as her
own, oh, so unspeakably, in intimacy. To drink him down--ah, like a
life-draught. She made great professions, to herself, of her
willingness to warm his foot-soles between her breasts, after the
fashion of the nauseous Meredith poem. But only on condition that he,