playful, then she gave
a short little laugh. And then only she turned to Ursula, who, with all
the class, had been watching the little scene between the lovers.

'How do you do, Miss Brangwen,' sang Hermione, in her low, odd, singing
fashion, that sounded almost as if she were poking fun. 'Do you mind my
coming in?'

Her grey, almost sardonic eyes rested all the while on Ursula, as if
summing her up.

'Oh no,' said Ursula.

'Are you SURE?' repeated Hermione, with complete sang froid, and an
odd, half-bullying effrontery.

'Oh no, I like it awfully,' laughed Ursula, a little bit excited and
bewildered, because Hermione seemed to be compelling her, coming very
close to her, as if intimate with her; and yet, how could she be
intimate?

This was the answer Hermione wanted. She turned satisfied to Birkin.

'What are you doing?' she sang, in her casual, inquisitive fashion.

'Catkins,' he replied.

'Really!' she said. 'And what do you learn about them?' She spoke all
the while in a mocking, half teasing fashion, as if making game of the
whole business. She picked up a twig of the catkin, piqued by Birkin's
attention to it.

She was a strange figure in the class-room, wearing a large, old cloak
of greenish cloth, on which was a raised pattern of dull gold. The high
collar, and the inside of the cloak, was lined with dark fur. Beneath
she had a dress of fine lavender-coloured cloth, trimmed with fur, and
her hat was close-fitting, made of fur and of the dull, green-and-gold
figured stuff. She was tall and strange, she looked as if she had come
out of some new, bizarre picture.

'Do you know the little red ovary flowers, that produce the nuts? Have
you ever noticed them?' he asked her. And he came close and pointed
them out to her, on the sprig she held.

'No,' she replied. 'What are they?'

'Those are the little seed-producing flowers, and the long catkins,
they only produce pollen, to fertilise them.'

'Do they, do they!' repeated Hermione, looking closely.

'From those little red bits, the nuts come; if they receive pollen from
the long danglers.'

'Little red flames, little red flames,' murmured Hermione to herself.
And she remained for some moments looking only at the small buds out of
which the red flickers of the stigma issued.

'Aren't they beautiful? I think they're so beautiful,' she said, moving
close to Birkin, and pointing to the red filaments with her long, white
finger.

'Had you never not