 and looked
at Ursula, from under her finely-curved lashes.
    »Why did I come back, Ursula?« she repeated. »I have asked myself a thousand
times.«
    »And don't you know?«
    »Yes, I think I do. I think my coming back home was just reculer pour mieux
sauter.«
    And she looked with a long, slow look of knowledge at Ursula.
    »I know!« cried Ursula, looking slightly dazzled and falsified, and as if
she did not know. »But where can one jump to?«
    »Oh, it doesn't matter,« said Gudrun, somewhat superbly. »If one jumps over
the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.«
    »But isn't it very risky?« asked Ursula.
    A slow mocking smile dawned on Gudrun's face.
    »Ah!« she said, laughing. »What is it all but words!« And so again she
closed the conversation. But Ursula was still brooding.
    »And how do you find home, now you have come back to it?« she asked.
    Gudrun paused for some moments, coldly, before answering. Then, in a cold
truthful voice, she said:
    »I find myself completely out of it.«
    »And father?«
    Gudrun looked at Ursula, almost with resentment, as if brought to bay.
    »I haven't thought about him: I've refrained,« she said coldly.
    »Yes,« wavered Ursula; and the conversation was really at an end. The
sisters found themselves confronted by a void, a terrifying chasm, as if they
had looked over the edge.
    They worked on in silence for some time, Gudrun's cheek was flushed with
repressed emotion. She resented its having been called into being.
    »Shall we go out and look at that wedding?« she asked at length, in a voice
that was too casual.
    »Yes!« cried Ursula, too eagerly, throwing aside her sewing and leaping up,
as if to escape something, thus betraying the tension of the situation and
causing a friction of dislike to go over Gudrun's nerves.
    As she went upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of her home round about
her. And she loathed it, the sordid, too-familiar place! She was afraid at the
depth of her feeling against the home, the milieu, the whole atmosphere and
condition of this obsolete life. Her feeling frightened her.
    The two girls were soon walking swiftly down the main
