‘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.’

Gudrun watched him as if in a hypnotic state, her eyes wide and fixed on him.

‘But in what way do you mean, disappear?—’ she persisted.

‘Yes, do you mean a change of heart?’ put in Gerald.

‘I don’t mean anything, why should I?’ said Birkin. ‘I’m an Englishman, and I’ve paid the price of it. I can’t talk about England—I can only speak for myself.’

‘Yes,’ said Gudrun slowly, ‘you love England immensely, IMMENSELY, Rupert.’

‘And leave her,’ he replied.

‘No, not for good. You’ll come back,’ said Gerald, nodding sagely.

‘They say the lice crawl off a dying body,’ said Birkin, with a glare of bitterness. ‘So I leave England.’

‘Ah, but you’ll come back,’ said Gudrun, with a sardonic smile.

‘Tant pis pour moi,’ he replied.

‘Isn’t he angry with his mother country!’ laughed Gerald, amused.

‘Ah, a patriot!’ said Gudrun, with something like a sneer.

Birkin refused to answer any more.

Gudrun watched him still for a few seconds. Then she turned away. It was finished, her spell of divination in him. She felt already purely cynical. She looked at Gerald. He was wonderful like a piece of radium to her. She felt she could consume herself and know ALL, by means of this fatal, living metal. She smiled to herself at her fancy. And what would she do with herself, when she had destroyed herself? For if spirit, if integral being is destructible, Matter is indestructible.