She hated it, she knew
how utterly cut off it was, how hideous and how sickeningly mindless.
Sometimes she beat her wings like a new Daphne, turning not into a tree
but a machine. And yet, she was overcome by the nostalgia. She
struggled to get more and more into accord with the atmosphere of the
place, she craved to get her satisfaction of it.
She felt herself drawn out at evening into the main street of the town,
that was uncreated and ugly, and yet surcharged with this same potent
atmosphere of intense, dark callousness. There were always miners
about. They moved with their strange, distorted dignity, a certain
beauty, and unnatural stillness in their bearing, a look of abstraction
and half resignation in their pale, often gaunt faces. They belonged to
another world, they had a strange glamour, their voices were full of an
intolerable deep resonance, like a machine's burring, a music more
maddening than the siren's long ago.
She found herself, with the rest of the common women, drawn out on
Friday evenings to the little market.
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