was afraid.

'So you have come home, expecting him here?' she laughed.

'Oh my dear,' cried Gudrun, strident, 'I wouldn't go out of my way to
look for him. But if there did happen to come along a highly attractive
individual of sufficient means--well--' she tailed off ironically. Then
she looked searchingly at Ursula, as if to probe her. 'Don't you find
yourself getting bored?' she asked of her sister. 'Don't you find, that
things fail to materialise? NOTHING MATERIALISES! Everything withers in
the bud.'

'What withers in the bud?' asked Ursula.

'Oh, everything--oneself--things in general.' There was a pause, whilst
each sister vaguely considered her fate.

'It does frighten one,' said Ursula, and again there was a pause. 'But
do you hope to get anywhere by just marrying?'

'It seems to be the inevitable next step,' said Gudrun. Ursula pondered
this, with a little bitterness. She was a class mistress herself, in
Willey Green Grammar School, as she had been for some years.

'I know,' she said, 'it seems like that when one thinks in the
abstract. But really imagine it: imagine any man one knows, imagine him
coming home to one every evening, and saying "Hello," and giving one a
kiss--'

There was a blank pause.

'Yes,' said Gudrun, in a narrowed voice. 'It's just impossible. The man
makes it impossible.'

'Of course there's children--' said Ursula doubtfully.

Gudrun's face hardened.

'Do you REALLY want children, Ursula?' she asked coldly. A dazzled,
baffled look came on Ursula's face.

'One feels it is still beyond one,' she said.

'DO you feel like that?' asked Gudrun. 'I get no feeling whatever from
the thought of bearing children.'

Gudrun looked at Ursula with a masklike, expressionless face. Ursula
knitted her brows.

'Perhaps it isn't genuine,' she faltered. 'Perhaps one doesn't really
want them, in one's soul--only superficially.' A hardness came over
Gudrun's face. She did not want to be too definite.

'When one thinks of other people's children--' said Ursula.

Again Gudrun looked at her sister, almost hostile.

'Exactly,' she said, to close the conversation.

The two sisters worked on in silence, Ursula having always that strange
brightness of an essential flame that is caught, meshed, contravened.
She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from
day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp
it in her own understanding. Her active living