‘All the world,’ she said.

‘Ah no—but some room.’

The tramcar mounted slowly up the hill, where the ugly winter–grey masses of houses looked like a vision of hell that is cold and angular. They sat and looked. Away in the distance was an angry redness of sunset. It was all cold, somehow small, crowded, and like the end of the world.

‘I don’t mind it even then,’ said Ursula, looking at the repulsiveness of it all. ‘It doesn’t concern me.’

‘No more it does,’ he replied, holding her hand. ‘One needn’t see. One goes one’s way. In my world it is sunny and spacious—’

‘It is, my love, isn’t it?’ she cried, hugging near to him on the top of the tramcar, so that the other passengers stared at them.

‘And we will wander about on the face of the earth,’ he said, ‘and we’ll look at the world beyond just this bit.’

There was a long silence. Her face was radiant like gold, as she sat thinking.

‘I don’t want to inherit the earth,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to inherit anything.’

He closed his hand over hers.

‘Neither do I. I want to be disinherited.’

She clasped his fingers closely.

‘We won’t care about ANYTHING,’ she said.

He sat still, and laughed.

‘And we’ll be married, and have done with them,’ she added.

Again he laughed.

‘It’s one way of getting rid of everything,’ she said, ‘to get married.’

‘And one way of accepting the whole world,’ he added.

‘A whole other world, yes,’ she said happily.

‘Perhaps there’s Gerald—and Gudrun—’ he said.

‘If there is there is, you see,’ she said. ‘It’s no good our worrying. We can’t really alter them, can we?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘One has no right to try—not with the best intentions in the world.’

‘Do you try to force them?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Why should I want him to be free, if it isn’t his business?’

She paused for a time.

‘We can’t MAKE him happy, anyhow,’ she said. ‘He’d have to be it of himself.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But we want other people with us, don’t we?’

‘Why should we?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said uneasily. ‘One has a hankering after a sort of further fellowship.’

‘But why?’ she insisted. ‘Why should you hanker after other people? Why should you need them?’

This hit him right on the quick. His brows knitted.

‘Does it end with just our two selves?’ he asked, tense.

‘Yes—what more do you want? If anybody likes to come along, let them. But why must you run after them?’

His face was tense and unsatisfied.