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They made their preparations to leave the next day. First they went to Gudrun’s room, where she and Gerald were just dressed ready for the evening indoors.

“Prune,” said Ursula, “I think we shall go away to-morrow. I can’t stand the snow any more. It hurts my skin and my soul.”

“Does it really hurt your soul, Ursula?” asked Gudrun, in some surprise. “I can believe quite it hurts your skin—it is terrible. But I thought it was admirable for the soul.”

“No, not for mine. It just injures it,” said Ursula.

“Really!” cried Gudrun.

There was a silence in the room. And Ursula and Birkin could feel that Gudrun and Gerald were relieved by their going.

“You will go south?” said Gerald, a little ring of uneasiness in his voice.

“Yes,” said Birkin, turning away. There was a queer, indefinable hostility between the two men, lately. Birkin was on the whole dim and indifferent, drifting along in a dim, easy flow, unnoticing and patient, since he came abroad, whilst Gerald on the other hand, was intense and gripped into white light, agonistes. The two men revoked one another.

Gerald and Gudrun were very kind to the two who were departing, solicitous for their welfare as if they were two children. Gudrun came to Ursula’s bedroom with three pairs of the coloured stockings for which she was notorious, and she threw them on the bed. But these were thick silk stockings, vermilion, cornflower blue, and grey, bought in Paris. The grey ones were knitted, seamless and heavy. Ursula was in raptures. She knew Gudrun must be feeling very loving, to give away such treasures.

“I can’t take them from you, Prune,” she cried. “I can’t possibly deprive you of them—the jewels.”

“Aren’t they jewels!” cried Gudrun, eyeing her gifts with an envious eye. “Aren’t they real lambs!”

“Yes, you must keep them,” said Ursula.

“I don’t want them, I’ve got three more pairs. I want you to keep them—I want you to have them. They’re yours, there—”

And with trembling, excited hands she put the coveted stockings under Ursula’s pillow.

“One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings,” said Ursula.

“One does,” replied Gudrun, “the greatest joy of all.”

And she sat down in the chair. It was evident she had come for a last talk. Ursula, not knowing what she wanted, waited in silence.

“Do you feel, Ursula,” Gudrun began, rather sceptically, “that you are going-away-for-ever, never-to-return, sort of thing?”

“Oh, we shall come back,” said Ursula. “It isn’t a question of train-journeys.”

“Yes, I know. But spiritually, so to speak, you are going away from us all?”

Ursula quivered.

“I don’t know a bit what is going to happen,” she said. “I only know we are going somewhere.”

Gudrun waited.

“And you are glad?” she asked.

Ursula meditated for a moment.

“I believe I am very glad,” she replied.

But Gudrun read the unconscious brightness on her sister’s face, rather than the uncertain tones of her speech.

“But don’t you think you’ll want the old connection with the world—rather and the rest of us, and all that it means, England and the world of thought—don’t you think you’ll need that, really to make a world?”

Ursula was silent, trying to imagine.

“I think,” she said at length, involuntarily, “that Rupert is right—one wants a new space to be in, and one falls away from the old.”

Gudrun watched her sister with impassive face and steady eyes.

“One wants a new space to be in, I quite agree,” she said. “But I think that a new world is a development from this world, and that to isolate oneself with one other person, isn’t to find a new world at all, but only to secure oneself in one’s illusions.”

Ursula looked out of the window. In her soul she began to wrestle, and she was frightened. She was always frightened of words, because she knew that mere word-force could always make her believe what she did not believe.

“Perhaps,” she said, full of mistrust, of herself and everybody. “But,” she added, “I do think that one can’t have anything new whilst one cares for the old—do