to see
if there was any fragment they would like to buy, amid the heaps of
rubbish collected on the cobble-stones.

The old market-square was not very large, a mere bare patch of granite
setts, usually with a few fruit-stalls under a wall. It was in a poor
quarter of the town. Meagre houses stood down one side, there was a
hosiery factory, a great blank with myriad oblong windows, at the end,
a street of little shops with flagstone pavement down the other side,
and, for a crowning monument, the public baths, of new red brick, with
a clock-tower. The people who moved about seemed stumpy and sordid, the
air seemed to smell rather dirty, there was a sense of many mean
streets ramifying off into warrens of meanness. Now and again a great
chocolate-and-yellow tramcar ground round a difficult bend under the
hosiery factory.

Ursula was superficially thrilled when she found herself out among the
common people, in the jumbled place piled with old bedding, heaps of
old iron, shabby crockery in pale lots, muffled lots of unthinkable
clothing. She and Birkin went unwillingly down the narrow aisle between
the rusty wares. He was looking at the goods, she at the people.

She excitedly watched a young woman, who was going to have a baby, and
who was turning over a mattress and making a young man, down-at-heel
and dejected, feel it also. So secretive and active and anxious the
young woman seemed, so reluctant, slinking, the young man. He was going
to marry her because she was having a child.

When they had felt the mattress, the young woman asked the old man
seated on a stool among his wares, how much it was. He told her, and
she turned to the young man. The latter was ashamed, and selfconscious.
He turned his face away, though he left his body standing there, and
muttered aside. And again the woman anxiously and actively fingered the
mattress and added up in her mind and bargained with the old, unclean
man. All the while, the young man stood by, shamefaced and
down-at-heel, submitting.

'Look,' said Birkin, 'there is a pretty chair.'

'Charming!' cried Ursula. 'Oh, charming.'

It was an arm-chair of simple wood, probably birch, but of such fine
delicacy of grace, standing there on the sordid stones, it almost
brought tears to the eyes. It was square in shape, of the purest,
slender lines, and four short lines of wood in the back, that reminded
Ursula of harpstrings.

'It was once,' said Birkin, 'gilded--and it had a cane se