The smile intensified a little, on his face.
“Not rabbits?” he said, looking at her fixedly.
Slowly her face relaxed into a smile of obscene recognition.
“Ah Gerald,” she said, in a strong, slow, almost man-like way. “—All that, and more.” Her eyes looked up at him with shocking nonchalance.
He felt again as if she had torn him across the breast, dully, finally. He turned aside.
“Eat, eat my darling!” Winifred was softly conjuring the rabbit, and creeping forward to touch it. It hobbled away from her. “Let its mother stroke its fur then, darling, because it is so mysterious—”
CHAPTER XIX.
MOONY
After his illness Birkin went to the south of France for a time. He did not write, nobody heard anything of him. Ursula, left alone, felt as if everything were lapsing out. There seemed to be no hope in the world. One was a tiny little rock with the tide of nothingness rising higher and higher She herself was real, and only herself—just like a rock in a wash of flood-water. The rest was all nothingness. She was hard and indifferent, isolated in herself.
There was nothing for it now, but contemptuous, resistant indifference. All the world was lapsing into a grey wish-wash of nothingness, she had no contact and no connection anywhere. She despised and detested the whole show. From the bottom of her heart, from the bottom of her soul, she despised and detested people, adult people. She loved only children and animals: children she loved passionately, but coldly. They made her want to hug them, to protect them, to give them life. But this very love, based on pity and despair, was only a bondage and a pain to her. She loved best of all the animals, that were single and unsocial as she herself was. She loved the horses and cows in the field. Each was single and to itself, magical. It was not referred away to some detestable social principle. It was incapable of soulfulness and tragedy, which she detested so profoundly.
She could be very pleasant and flattering, almost subservient, to people she met. But no one was taken in. Instinctively each felt her contemptuous mockery of the human being in himself, or herself. She had a profound grudge against the human being. That which the word “human” stood for was despicable and repugnant to her.