Page:Women in Love, Lawrence, 1920.djvu/60

52 "Of course," cried Ursula, suddenly, "she ought to thank her stars if we will go and see her. You are perfectly beautiful, a thousand times more beautiful than ever she is or was, and to my thinking, a thousand times more beautifully dressed, for she never looks fresh and natural, like a flower, always old, thought-out; and we are more intelligent than most people."

"Undoubtedly," said Gudrun.

"And it ought to be admitted, simply," said Ursula.

"Certainly it ought," said Gudrun. "But you'll find that the really chic thing is to be so absolutely ordinary, so perfectly commonplace and like the person in the street, that you really are a masterpiece of humanity, not the person in the street actually, but the artistic creation of her — "

"How awful!" cried Ursula.

"Yes, Ursula, it is awful, in most respects. You daren't be anything that isn't amazingly a terre, so much a terre that it is the artistic creation of ordinaryness."

"It's very dull to create oneself into nothing better," laughed Ursula.

"Very dull!" retorted Gudrun. "Really, Ursula, it is dull, that's just the word. One longs to be high-flown, and make speeches like Corneille, after it."

Gudrun was becoming flushed and excited over her own cleverness.

"Strut," said Ursula. "One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese."

"Exactly," cried Gudrun, "a swan among geese."

"They are all so busy playing the ugly duckling," cried Ursula, with mocking laughter. "And I don't feel a bit like a humble and pathetic ugly duckling. I do feel like a swan among geese — I can't help it. They make one feel so. And I don't care what they think of me. — Je m'en fiche." Gudrun looked up at Ursula with a queer, uncertain envy and dislike.

"Of course, the only thing to do is to despise them all — just all," she said.

The sisters went home again, to read and talk and work, and wait for Monday, for school. Ursula often wondered what else she waited for, besides the beginning and end of