There
seemed a magic circle drawn about the place, shutting out the present,
enclosing the delightful, precious past, trees and deer and silence,
like a dream.
But in spirit she was unhappy. The talk went on like a rattle of small
artillery, always slightly sententious, with a sententiousness that was
only emphasised by the continual crackling of a witticism, the
continual spatter of verbal jest, designed to give a tone of flippancy
to a stream of conversation that was all critical and general, a canal
of conversation rather than a stream.
The attitude was mental and very wearying. Only the elderly
sociologist, whose mental fibre was so tough as to be insentient,
seemed to be thoroughly happy. Birkin was down in the mouth. Hermione
appeared, with amazing persistence, to wish to ridicule him and make
him look ignominious in the eyes of everybody. And it was surprising
how she seemed to succeed, how helpless he seemed against her. He
looked completely insignificant. Ursula and Gudrun, both very unused,
were mostly silent, listening to the slow, rhapsodic sing-song of
Hermione, or the verbal sallies of Sir Joshua, or the prattle of
Fraulein, or the responses of the other two women.
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