'How old are you?' she asked.
He looked up at her with his full, elfin eyes startled.
'WIE ALT?' he repeated. And he hesitated. It was evidently one of his
reticencies.
'How old are YOU?' he replied, without answering.
'I am twenty-six,' she answered.
'Twenty-six,' he repeated, looking into her eyes. He paused. Then he
said:
'UND IHR HERR GEMAHL, WIE ALT IS ER?'
'Who?' asked Gudrun.
'Your husband,' said Ursula, with a certain irony.
'I haven't got a husband,' said Gudrun in English. In German she
answered,
'He is thirty-one.'
But Loerke was watching closely, with his uncanny, full, suspicious
eyes. Something in Gudrun seemed to accord with him. He was really like
one of the 'little people' who have no soul, who has found his mate in
a human being. But he suffered in his discovery. She too was fascinated
by him, fascinated, as if some strange creature, a rabbit or a bat, or
a brown seal, had begun to talk to her. But also, she knew what he was
unconscious of, his tremendous power of understanding, of apprehending
her living motion.
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