y be
loved. They could only be afraid, and tremblingly submit to
fear, and become sacrificial; or they could submit to love, and
become beloveds. In both they were passive. Raging, destructive
lovers, seeking the moment when fear is greatest, and triumph is
greatest, the fear not greater than the triumph, the triumph not
greater than the fear, these were no lambs nor doves. She
stretched her own limbs like a lion or a wild horse, her heart
was relentless in its desires. It would suffer a thousand
deaths, but it would still be a lion's heart when it rose from
death, a fiercer lion she would be, a surer, knowing herself
different from and separate from the great, conflicting universe
that was not herself.

Winifred Inger was also interested in the Women's
Movement.

"The men will do no more,--they have lost the capacity
for doing," said the elder girl. "They fuss and talk, but they
are really inane. They make everything fit into an old, inert
idea. Love is a dead idea to them. They don't come to one and
love one, they come to an idea, and they say 'You are my idea,'
so they embrace themselves. As if I were any man's idea! As if I
exist because a man has an idea of me! As if I will be betrayed
by him, lend him my body as an instrument for his idea, to be a
mere apparatus of his dead theory. But they are too fussy to be
able to act; they are all impotent, they can't take a
woman. They come to their own idea every time, and take that.
They are like serpents trying to swallow themselves because they
are hungry."

Ursula was introduced by her friend to various women and men,
educated, unsatisfied people, who still moved within the smug
provincial society as if they were nearly as tame as their
outward behaviour showed, but who were inwardly raging and
mad.

It was a strange world the girl was swept into, like a chaos,
like the end of the world. She was too young to understand it
all. Yet the inoculation passed into her, through her love for
her mistress.

The examination came, and then school was over. It was the
long vacation. Winifred Inger went away to London. Ursula was
left alone in Cossethay. A terrible, outcast, almost poisonous
despair possessed her. It was no use doing anything, or being
anything. She had no connection with other people. Her lot was
isolated and deadly. There was nothing for her anywhere, but
this black disintegration. Yet, within all the great attack of
disintegration upon her, she remain