Page:Women in Love, Lawrence, 1920.djvu/45

Rh 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 fertilize them."

"Do they, do they?" repeated Hermione, looking closely.

"From those little red bits, the nuts come; if they receive pollen from the long danglers."

"Little red flames, little red flames," murmured Hermione to herself. And she remained for some moments looking only at the small buds out of which the red flickers of the stigma issued.

"Aren't they beautiful? I think they're so beautiful," she said, moving close to Birkin, and pointing to the red filaments with her long, white finger.

"Had you never noticed them before?" he asked.

"No, never before," she replied.

"And now you will always see them," he said.

"Now I shall always see them," she repeated. "Thank you so much for showing me. I think they're so beautiful — little red flames — "

Her absorption was strange, almost rhapsodic. Both Birkin and Ursula were suspended. The little red pistillate flowers had some strange, almost mystic-passionate attraction for her.

The lesson was finished, the books were put away, at last the class was dismissed. And still Hermione sat at the table, with her chin in her hand, her elbow on the table, her long white face pushed up, not attending to anything. Birkin had gone to the window, and was looking from the brilliantly lighted room on to the grey, colourless outside, where rain was noiselessly falling. Ursula put away her things in the cupboard.

At length Hermione rose and came near to her.

"Your sister has come home?" she said.