'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 road of Beldover,
a wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and
sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and
Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery
town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid
gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed
to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was
strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the full
effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why had she
wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to submit herself to