Perhaps it
was the absence of volition. For he was strangely elated at Rupert's
offer. Yet he was still more glad to reject it, not to be committed.
CHAPTER XXVI.
A CHAIR
There was a jumble market every Monday afternoon in the old
market-place in town. Ursula and Birkin strayed down there one
afternoon. They had been talking of furniture, and they wanted to see
if there was any fragment they would like to buy, amid the heaps of
rubbish collected on the cobble-stones.
The old market-square was not very large, a mere bare patch of granite
setts, usually with a few fruit-stalls under a wall. It was in a poor
quarter of the town. Meagre houses stood down one side, there was a
hosiery factory, a great blank with myriad oblong windows, at the end,
a street of little shops with flagstone pavement down the other side,
and, for a crowning monument, the public baths, of new red brick, with
a clock-tower. The people who moved about seemed stumpy and sordid, the
air seemed to smell rather dirty, there was a sense of many mean
streets ramifying off into warrens of meanness.
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