It was
all unnecessary, and he himself need not have provoked it.
The two men sat in complete silence, Birkin almost unconscious of his
own whereabouts. He had come to ask her to marry him--well then, he
would wait on, and ask her. As for what she said, whether she accepted
or not, he did not think about it. He would say what he had come to
say, and that was all he was conscious of. He accepted the complete
insignificance of this household, for him. But everything now was as if
fated. He could see one thing ahead, and no more. From the rest, he was
absolved entirely for the time being. It had to be left to fate and
chance to resolve the issues.
At length they heard the gate. They saw her coming up the steps with a
bundle of books under her arm. Her face was bright and abstracted as
usual, with the abstraction, that look of being not quite THERE, not
quite present to the facts of reality, that galled her father so much.
She had a maddening faculty of assuming a light of her own, which
excluded the reality, and within which she looked radiant as if in
sunshine.
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