It irritated him.
“If I do love it,” he said, “it is my disease.”
“But it is a disease you don’t want to be cured of,” she said, with some cold sneering.
He was silent now, feeling she wanted to insult him.
“And if you don’t believe in love, what do you believe in?” she asked mocking. “Simply in the end of the world, and grass?”
He was beginning to feel a fool.
“I believe in the unseen hosts,” he said.
“And nothing else? You believe in nothing visible, except grass and birds? Your world is a poor show.”
“Perhaps it is,” he said, cool and superior now he was offended, assuming a certain insufferable aloof superiority, and withdrawing into his distance.
Ursula disliked him. But also she felt she had lost something. She looked at him as he sat crouched on the bank. There was a certain priggish Sunday-school stiffness over him, priggish and detestable. And yet, at the same time, the moulding of him was so quick and attractive, it gave such a great sense of freedom: the moulding of his brows, his chin, his whole physique, something so alive, somewhere, in spite of the look of sickness.