'And how did you become a sculptor?' asked Ursula.

'How did I become a sculptor--' he paused. 'Dunque--' he resumed, in a
changed manner, and beginning to speak French--'I became old enough--I
used to steal from the market-place. Later I went to work--imprinted
the stamp on clay bottles, before they were baked. It was an
earthenware-bottle factory. There I began making models. One day, I had
had enough. I lay in the sun and did not go to work. Then I walked to
Munich--then I walked to Italy--begging, begging everything.'

'The Italians were very good to me--they were good and honourable to
me. From Bozen to Rome, almost every night I had a meal and a bed,
perhaps of straw, with some peasant. I love the Italian people, with
all my heart.

'Dunque, adesso--maintenant--I earn a thousand pounds in a year, or I
earn two thousand--'

He looked down at the ground, his voice tailing off into silence.

Gudrun looked at his fine, thin, shiny skin, reddish-brown from the
sun, drawn tight over his full temples; and at his thin hair--and at
the thick, coarse, brush-like moustache, cut short about his mobile,
rather shapeless mouth.

'How old are you?' she asked.

He looked up at her with his full, elfin eyes startled.

'WIE ALT?' he repeated. And he hesitated. It was evidently one of his
reticencies.

'How old are YOU?' he replied, without answering.

'I am twenty-six,' she answered.

'Twenty-six,' he repeated, looking into her eyes. He paused. Then he
said:

'UND IHR HERR GEMAHL, WIE ALT IS ER?'

'Who?' asked Gudrun.

'Your husband,' said Ursula, with a certain irony.

'I haven't got a husband,' said Gudrun in English. In German she
answered,

'He is thirty-one.'

But Loerke was watching closely, with his uncanny, full, suspicious
eyes. Something in Gudrun seemed to accord with him. He was really like
one of the 'little people' who have no soul, who has found his mate in
a human being. But he suffered in his discovery. She too was fascinated
by him, fascinated, as if some strange creature, a rabbit or a bat, or
a brown seal, had begun to talk to her. But also, she knew what he was
unconscious of, his tremendous power of understanding, of apprehending
her living motion. He did not know his own power. He did not know how,
with his full, submerged, watchful eyes, he could look into her and see
her, what she was, see her secrets. He would only want her to be
herself--he knew her verily, with a subconscious,