`Don't you love to be in this place?' cried Gudrun. `Isn't the snow wonderful! Do you notice how it exalts everything? It is simply marvellous. One really does feel iibermenschlich -- more than human.'

`One does,' cried Ursula. `But isn't that partly the being out of England?'

`Oh, of course,' cried Gudrun. `One could never feel like this in England, for the simple reason that the damper is never lifted off one, there. It is quite impossible really to let go, in England, of that I am assured.'

And she turned again to the food she was eating. She was fluttering with vivid intensity.

`It's quite true,' said Gerald, `it never is quite the same in England. But perhaps we don't want it to be -- perhaps it's like bringing the light a little too near the powder-magazine, to let go altogether, in England. One is afraid what might happen, if everybody else let go.'

`My God!' cried Gudrun. `But wouldn't it be wonderful, if all England did suddenly go off like a display of fireworks.'

`It couldn't,' said Ursula. `They are all too damp, the powder is damp in them.'

`I'm not so sure of that,' said Gerald.

`Nor I,' said Birkin. `When the English really begin to go off, en masse, it'll be time to shut your ears and run.'

`They never will,' said Ursula.

`We'll see,' he replied.

`Isn't it marvellous,' said Gudrun, `how thankful one can be, to be out of one's country. I cannot believe myself, I am so transported, the moment I set foot on a foreign shore. I say to myself "Here steps a new creature into life."'

`Don't be too hard on poor old England,' said Gerald. `Though we curse it, we love it really.'

To Ursula, there seemed a fund of cynicism in these words.

`We may,' said Birkin. `But it's a damnably uncomfortable love: like a love for an aged parent who suffers horribly from a complication of diseases, for which there is no hope.'

Gudrun looked at him with dilated dark eyes.

`You think there is no hope?' she asked, in her pertinent fashion.

But Birkin backed away. He would not answer such a question.

`Any hope of England's becoming real? God knows. It's a great actual unreality now, an aggregation into unreality. It might be real, if there were no Englishmen.'

`You think the English will have to disappear?' persisted Gudrun. It was strange, her pointed interest in his answer. It might have been her own fate she was inquiring after. Her dark, dilated eyes rested on Birkin, as if she could conjure the truth of the future out of him, as out of some instrument of divination.

He was pale. Then, reluctantly, he answered:

`Well -- what else is in front of them, but disappearance? They've got to disappear from their own special brand of Englishness, anyhow.'