Her face was flushed and transfigured. Loerke who was sitting with his head ducked, like some creature at bay, looked up at her, swiftly, almost furtively, and murmured,
“Ja—so ist es, so ist es.”
Ursula was silent after this outburst. She was furious. She wanted to poke a hole into them both.
“It isn’t a word of it true, of all this harangue you have made me,” she replied flatly. “The horse is a picture of your own stock, stupid brutality, and the girl was a girl you loved and tortured and then ignored.”
He looked up at her with a small smile of contempt in his eyes. He would not trouble to answer this last charge.
Gudrun too was silent in exasperated contempt. Ursula was such an insufferable outsider, rushing in where angels would fear to tread. But then—fools must be suffered, if not gladly.
But Ursula was persistent too.
“As for your world of art and your world of reality,” she replied, “you have to separate the two, because you can’t bear to know what you are. You can’t bear to realise what a stock, stiff, hide-bound brutality you are really, so you say ‘it’s the world of art.’ The world of art is only the truth about the real world, that’s all—but you are too far gone to see it.”
She was white and trembling, intent. Gudrun and Loerke sat in stiff dislike of her. Gerald too, who had come up in the beginning of the speech, stood looking at her in complete disapproval and opposition. He felt she was undignified, she put a sort of vulgarity over the esotericism which gave man his last distinction. He joined his forces with the other two. They all three wanted her to go away. But she sat on in silence, her soul weeping, throbbing violently, her fingers twisting her handkerchief.
The others maintained a dead silence, letting the display of Ursula’s obtrusiveness pass by. Then Gudrun asked, in a voice that was quite cool and casual, as if resuming a casual conversation: