act faces of the men. The air was full of the sound of criers
and of people talking, thick streams of people moved on the pavements
towards the solid crowd of the market. The shops were blazing and
packed with women, in the streets were men, mostly men, miners of all
ages. Money was spent with almost lavish freedom.

The carts that came could not pass through. They had to wait, the
driver calling and shouting, till the dense crowd would make way.
Everywhere, young fellows from the outlying districts were making
conversation with the girls, standing in the road and at the corners.
The doors of the public-houses were open and full of light, men passed
in and out in a continual stream, everywhere men were calling out to
one another, or crossing to meet one another, or standing in little
gangs and circles, discussing, endlessly discussing. The sense of talk,
buzzing, jarring, half-secret, the endless mining and political
wrangling, vibrated in the air like discordant machinery. And it was
their voices which affected Gudrun almost to swooning. They aroused a
strange, nostalgic ache of desire, something almost demoniacal, never
to be fulfilled.

Like any other common girl of the district, Gudrun strolled up and
down, up and down the length of the brilliant two-hundred paces of the
pavement nearest the market-place. She knew it was a vulgar thing to
do; her father and mother could not bear it; but the nostalgia came
over her, she must be among the people. Sometimes she sat among the
louts in the cinema: rakish-looking, unattractive louts they were. Yet
she must be among them.

And, like any other common lass, she found her 'boy.' It was an
electrician, one of the electricians introduced according to Gerald's
new scheme. He was an earnest, clever man, a scientist with a passion
for sociology. He lived alone in a cottage, in lodgings, in Willey
Green. He was a gentleman, and sufficiently well-to-do. His landlady
spread the reports about him; he WOULD have a large wooden tub in his
bedroom, and every time he came in from work, he WOULD have pails and
pails of water brought up, to bathe in, then he put on clean shirt and
under-clothing EVERY day, and clean silk socks; fastidious and exacting
he was in these respects, but in every other way, most ordinary and
unassuming.

Gudrun knew all these things. The Brangwen's house was one to which the
gossip came naturally and inevitably. Palmer was in the first place a
friend of Ursul