“Oh no, I like it awfully,” laughed Ursula, a little bit excited and bewildered, because Hermione seemed to be compelling her, coming very close to her, as if intimate with her; and yet, how could she be intimate?
This was the answer Hermione wanted. She turned satisfied to Birkin.
“What are you doing?” she sang, in her casual, inquisitive fashion.
“Catkins,” he replied.
“Really!” she said. “And what do you learn about them?” She spoke all the while in a mocking, half teasing fashion, as if making game of the whole business. She picked up a twig of the catkin, piqued by Birkin’s attention to it.
She was a strange figure in the class-room, wearing a large, old cloak of greenish cloth, on which was a raised pattern of dull gold. The high collar, and the inside of the cloak, was lined with dark fur. Beneath she had a dress of fine lavender-coloured cloth, trimmed with fur, and her hat was close-fitting, made of fur and of the dull, green-and-gold figured stuff. She was tall and strange, she looked as if she had come out of some new, bizarre picture.
“Do you know the little red ovary flowers, that produce the nuts? Have you ever noticed them?” he asked her. And he came close and pointed them out to her, on the sprig she held.
“No,” she replied. “What are they?”
“Those are the little seed-producing flowers, and the long catkins, they only produce pollen, to fertilise them.”
“Do they, do they!” repeated Hermione, looking closely.