`No. I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don't.'

`But why?' she laughed.

And, consumed with a desire to see how the other rings would look on her hand, she put them on her little finger.

`They can be made a little bigger,' he said.

`Yes,' she replied, doubtfully. And she sighed. She knew that, in accepting the rings, she was accepting a pledge. Yet fate seemed more than herself. She looked again at the jewels. They were very beautiful to her eyes--not as ornament, or wealth, but as tiny fragments of loveliness.

`I'm glad you bought them,' she said, putting her hand, half unwillingly, gently on his arm.

He smiled, slightly. He wanted her to come to him. But he was angry at the bottom of his soul, and indifferent. He knew she had a passion for him, really. But it was not finally interesting. There were depths of passion when one became impersonal and indifferent, unemotional. Whereas Ursula was still at the emotional personal level--always so abominably personal. He had taken her as he had never been taken himself. He had taken her at the roots of her darkness and shame--like a demon, laughing over the fountain of mystic corruption which was one of the sources of her being, laughing, shrugging, accepting, accepting finally. As for her, when would she so much go beyond herself as to accept him at the quick of death?

She now became quite happy. The motor-car ran on, the afternoon was soft and dim. She talked with lively interest, analysing people and their motives--Gudrun, Gerald. He answered vaguely. He was not very much interested any more in personalities and in people--people were all different, but they were all enclosed nowadays in a definite limitation, he said; there were only about two great ideas, two great streams of activity remaining, with various forms of reaction therefrom. The reactions were all varied in various people, but they followed a few great laws, and intrinsically there was no difference. They acted and reacted involuntarily according to a few great laws, and once the laws, the great principles, were known, people were no longer mystically interesting. They were all essentially alike, the differences were only variations on a theme. None of them transcended the given terms.

Ursula did not agree--people were still an adventure to her--but--perhaps not as much as she tried to persuade herself. Perhaps there was something mechanical, now, in her interest. Perhaps also her interest was destructive, her analysing was a real tearing to pieces. There was an under-space in her where she did not care for people and their idiosyncracies, even to destroy them. She seemed to touch for a moment this undersilence in herself, she became still, and she turned for a moment purely to Birkin.

`Won't it be lovely to go home in the dark?' she said. `We might have tea rather late--shall we?--and have high tea? Wouldn't that be rather nice?'

`I promised to be at Shortlands for dinner,' he said.

`But--it doesn't matter--you can go tomorrow--'

`Hermione is there,' he said, in rather an uneasy voice. `She is going away in two days. I suppose I ought to say good-bye to her. I shall never see her again.'

Ursula drew away, closed in a violent silence. He knitted his brows, and his eyes began to sparkle again in anger.

`You don't mind, do you?' he asked irritably.

`No, I don't care. Why should I? Why should I mind?' Her tone was jeering and offensive.