'
'Perhaps it is,' he said, cool and superior now he was offended,
assuming a certain insufferable aloof superiority, and withdrawing into
his distance.
Ursula disliked him. But also she felt she had lost something. She
looked at him as he sat crouched on the bank. There was a certain
priggish Sunday-school stiffness over him, priggish and detestable. And
yet, at the same time, the moulding of him was so quick and attractive,
it gave such a great sense of freedom: the moulding of his brows, his
chin, his whole physique, something so alive, somewhere, in spite of
the look of sickness.
And it was this duality in feeling which he created in her, that made a
fine hate of him quicken in her bowels. There was his wonderful,
desirable life-rapidity, the rare quality of an utterly desirable man:
and there was at the same time this ridiculous, mean effacement into a
Salvator Mundi and a Sunday-school teacher, a prig of the stiffest
type.
He looked up at her. He saw her face strangely enkindled, as if
suffused from within by a powerful sweet fire.
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