 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 mask-like, 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 was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness,
something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last
integuments! She seemed to try and put her hands out, like an infant in the
womb, and she could not, not yet. Still she had a strange prescience, an
intimation of something yet to come.
    She laid down her work and looked at her sister. She thought Gudrun so
charming, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine, exquisite
richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain playfulness about
her too, such a piquancy or ironic suggestion, such an untouched reserve. Ursula
admired her with all her soul.
    »Why did you come home, Prune?« she asked.
    Gudrun knew she was being admired. She sat back from her drawing
