directions, and disappeared meaninglessly out of life. It was no good -- he too was without unity, without mind, in the ultimate stages of living; not quite man enough to make a destiny for a woman.

They sat on till Birkin came in and found them together. He felt at once the antagonism in the atmosphere, something radical and insuperable, and he bit his lip. But he affected a bluff manner.

`Hello, Hermione, are you back again? How do you feel?'

`Oh, better. And how are you -- you don't look well --'

`Oh! -- I believe Gudrun and Winnie Crich are coming in to tea. At least they said they were. We shall be a tea-party. What train did you come by, Ursula?'

It was rather annoying to see him trying to placate both women at once. Both women watched him, Hermione with deep resentment and pity for him, Ursula very impatient. He was nervous and apparently in quite good spirits, chattering the conventional commonplaces. Ursula was amazed and indignant at the way he made small-talk; he was adept as any fat in Christendom. She became quite stiff, she would not answer. It all seemed to her so false and so belittling. And still Gudrun did not appear.

`I think I shall go to Florence for the winter,' said Hermione at length.

`Will you?' he answered. `But it is so cold there.'

`Yes, but I shall stay with Palestra. It is quite comfortable.'

`What takes you to Florence?'

`I don't know,' said Hermione slowly. Then she looked at him with her slow, heavy gaze. `Barnes is starting his school of aesthetics, and Olandese is going to give a set of discourses on the Italian national policy-- '

`Both rubbish,' he said.

`No, I don't think so,' said Hermione.

`Which do you admire, then?'

`I admire both. Barnes is a pioneer. And then I am interested in Italy, in her coming to national consciousness.'

`I wish she'd come to something different from national consciousness, then,' said Birkin; `especially as it only means a sort of commercial-industrial consciousness. I hate Italy and her national rant. And I think Barnes is an amateur.'

Hermione was silent for some moments, in a state of hostility. But yet, she had got Birkin back again into her world! How subtle her influence was, she seemed to start his irritable attention into her direction exclusively, in one minute. He was her creature.

`No,' she said, `you are wrong.' Then a sort of tension came over her, she raised her face like the pythoness inspired with oracles, and went on, in rhapsodic manner: `Il Sandro mi scrive che ha accolto il piu grande entusiasmo, tutti i giovani, e fanciulle e ragazzi, sono tutti --' She went on in Italian, as if, in thinking of the Italians she thought in their language.

He listened with a shade of distaste to her rhapsody, then he said:

`For all that, I don't like it. Their nationalism is just industrialism -- that and a shallow jealousy I detest so much.'