Page:Women in Love, Lawrence, 1920.djvu/43

Rh lights. The class-room was distinct and hard, a strange place after the soft dim magic that filled it before he came. Birkin turned curiously to look at Ursula. Her eyes were round and wondering, bewildered, her mouth quivered slightly. She looked like one who is suddenly wakened. There was a living, tender beauty, like a tender light of dawn shining from her face. He looked at her with a new pleasure, feeling gay in his heart, irresponsible.

"You are doing catkins?" he asked, picking up a piece of hazel from a scholar's desk in front of him. "Are they as far out as this? I hadn't noticed them this year."

He looked absorbedly at the tassel of hazel in his hand.

"The red ones, too!" he said, looking at the flickers of crimson that came from the female bud.

Then he went in among the desks, to see the scholar's books. Ursula watched his intent progress. There was a stillness in his motion that hushed the activities of her heart. She seemed to be standing aside in arrested silence, watching him move in another, concentrated world. His presence was so quiet, almost like a vacancy in the corporate air.

Suddenly he lifted his face to her, and her heart quickened at the flicker of his voice.

"Give them some crayons, won't you?" he said, "so that they can make the gynaecious flowers red, and the androgynous yellow. I'd chalk them in plain, chalk in nothing else, merely the red and the yellow. Outline scarcely matters in this case. There is just the one fact to emphasize."

"I haven't any crayons," said Ursula.

"There will be some somewhere—red and yellow, that's all you want."

Ursula sent out a boy on a quest.

"It will make the books untidy," she said to Birkin, flushing deeply.

"Not very," he said. "You must mark in these things obviously. It's the fact you want to emphasize, not the subjective impression to record. What's the fact?—red, little spiky stigmas of the female flower, dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the other. Make a pictorial record of the fact, as a child does when drawing a