‘Well, Winifred,’ said the father, ‘aren’t you glad Miss Brangwen has come? She makes animals and birds in wood and in clay, that the people in London write about in the papers, praising them to the skies.’

Winifred smiled slightly.

‘Who told you, Daddie?’ she asked.

‘Who told me? Hermione told me, and Rupert Birkin.’

‘Do you know them?’ Winifred asked of Gudrun, turning to her with faint challenge.

‘Yes,’ said Gudrun.

Winifred readjusted herself a little. She had been ready to accept Gudrun as a sort of servant. Now she saw it was on terms of friendship they were intended to meet. She was rather glad. She had so many half inferiors, whom she tolerated with perfect good–humour.

Gudrun was very calm. She also did not take these things very seriously. A new occasion was mostly spectacular to her. However, Winifred was a detached, ironic child, she would never attach herself. Gudrun liked her and was intrigued by her. The first meetings went off with a certain humiliating clumsiness. Neither Winifred nor her instructress had any social grace.

Soon, however, they met in a kind of make–belief world. Winifred did not notice human beings unless they were like herself, playful and slightly mocking. She would accept nothing but the world of amusement, and the serious people of her life were the animals she had for pets. On those she lavished, almost ironically, her affection and her companionship. To the rest of the human scheme she submitted with a faint bored indifference.

She had a pekinese dog called Looloo, which she loved.

‘Let us draw Looloo,’ said Gudrun, ‘and see if we can get his Looliness, shall we?’

‘Darling!’ cried Winifred, rushing to the dog, that sat with contemplative sadness on the hearth, and kissing its bulging brow. ‘Darling one, will you be drawn? Shall its mummy draw its portrait?’ Then she chuckled gleefully, and turning to Gudrun, said: ‘Oh let’s!’

They proceeded to get pencils and paper, and were ready.

‘Beautifullest,’ cried Winifred, hugging the dog, ‘sit still while its mummy draws its beautiful portrait.’ The dog looked up at her with grievous resignation in its large, prominent eyes. She kissed it fervently, and said: ‘I wonder what mine will be like. It’s sure to be awful.’

As she sketched she chuckled to herself, and cried out at times:

‘Oh darling, you’re so beautiful!’

And again chuckling, she rushed to embrace the dog, in penitence, as if she were doing him some subtle injury. He sat all the time with the resignation and fretfulness of ages on his dark velvety face. She drew slowly, with a wicked concentration in her eyes, her head on one side, an intense stillness over her. She was as if working the spell of some enchantment. Suddenly she had finished. She looked at the dog, and then at her drawing, and then cried, with real grief for the dog, and at the same time with a wicked exultation: