ame bedroom, had
now reached the stage of loathing. Leitner hated Loerke with an
injured, writhing, impotent hatred, and Loerke treated Leitner with a
fine-quivering contempt and sarcasm. Soon the two would have to go
apart.

Already they were rarely together. Leitner ran attaching himself to
somebody or other, always deferring, Loerke was a good deal alone. Out
of doors he wore a Westphalian cap, a close brown-velvet head with big
brown velvet flaps down over his ears, so that he looked like a
lop-eared rabbit, or a troll. His face was brown-red, with a dry,
bright skin, that seemed to crinkle with his mobile expressions. His
eyes were arresting--brown, full, like a rabbit's, or like a troll's,
or like the eyes of a lost being, having a strange, dumb, depraved look
of knowledge, and a quick spark of uncanny fire. Whenever Gudrun had
tried to talk to him he had shied away unresponsive, looking at her
with his watchful dark eyes, but entering into no relation with her. He
had made her feel that her slow French and her slower German, were
hateful to him. As for his own inadequate English, he was much too
awkward to try it at all. But he understood a good deal of what was
said, nevertheless. And Gudrun, piqued, left him alone.

This afternoon, however, she came into the lounge as he was talking to
Ursula. His fine, black hair somehow reminded her of a bat, thin as it
was on his full, sensitive-looking head, and worn away at the temples.
He sat hunched up, as if his spirit were bat-like. And Gudrun could see
he was making some slow confidence to Ursula, unwilling, a slow,
grudging, scanty self-revelation. She went and sat by her sister.

He looked at her, then looked away again, as if he took no notice of
her. But as a matter of fact, she interested him deeply.

'Isn't it interesting, Prune,' said Ursula, turning to her sister,
'Herr Loerke is doing a great frieze for a factory in Cologne, for the
outside, the street.'

She looked at him, at his thin, brown, nervous hands, that were
prehensile, and somehow like talons, like 'griffes,' inhuman.

'What IN?' she asked.

'AUS WAS?' repeated Ursula.

'GRANIT,' he replied.

It had become immediately a laconic series of question and answer
between fellow craftsmen.

'What is the relief?' asked Gudrun.

'Alto relievo.'

'And at what height?'

It was very interesting to Gudrun to think of his making the great
granite frieze for a great granite factory in Cologne. S