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“Of course,” she said easily, “there is a quality of life in Birkin which is quite remarkable. There is an extraordinary rich spring of life in him, really amazing, the way he can give himself to things. But there are so many things in life that he simply doesn’t know. Either he is not aware of their existence at all, or he dismisses them as merely negligible—things which are vital to the other person. In a way, he is not clever enough, he is too intense in spots.”

“Yes,” cried Ursula, “too much of a preacher. He is really a priest.”

“Exactly! He can’t hear what anybody else has to say—he simply cannot hear. His own voice is so loud.”

“Yes. He cries you down.”

“He cries you down,” repeated Gudrun. “And by mere force of violence. And of course it is hopeless. Nobody is convinced by violence. It makes talking to him impossible—and living with him I should think would be more than impossible.”

“You don’t think one could live with him?” asked Ursula.

“I think it would be too wearing, too exhausting. One would be shouted down every time, and rushed into his way without any choice. He would want to control you entirely. He cannot allow that there is any other mind than his own. And then the real clumsiness of his mind, is its lack of self-criticism. No, I think it would be perfectly intolerable.”

“Yes,” assented Ursula vaguely. She only half agreed with Gudrun. “The nuisance is,” she said, “that one would find almost any man intolerable after a fortnight.”

“It’s perfectly dreadful,” said Gudrun. “But Birkin—he is too positive. He couldn’t bear it if you called your soul your own. Of him that is strictly true.”

“Yes,” said Ursula. “You must have his soul.”

“Exactly! And what can you conceive more deadly?” This was all so true, that Ursula felt jarred to the bottom of her soul with ugly distaste.

She went on, with the discord jarring and jolting through her, in the most barren of misery.

Then there started a revulsion from Gudrun. She finished life off so thoroughly, she made things so ugly and so final. As a matter of fact, even if it were as Gudrun said, about Birkin, other things were true as well. But Gudrun would draw two lines under him and cross him out like an account that is settled. There he was, summed up, paid for, settled, done with. And it was such a lie. This finality of Gudrun’s, this dispatching of people and things in a sentence, it was all such a lie. Ursula began to revolt from her sister.

One day as they were walking along the lane, they saw a robin sitting on the top twig of a bush, singing shrilly. The sisters stood to look at him. An ironical smile 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 yellow-hammers 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