Gudrun could only partly understand. She could have cried with vexation.

‘What does he say?’ she asked Ursula. And Ursula translated, stammering and brief. Loerke watched Gudrun’s face, to see her judgment.

‘And do you think then,’ said Gudrun, ‘that art should serve industry?’

‘Art should INTERPRET industry, as art once interpreted religion,’ he said.

‘But does your fair interpret industry?’ she asked him.

‘Certainly. What is man doing, when he is at a fair like this? He is fulfilling the counterpart of labour—the machine works him, instead of he the machine. He enjoys the mechanical motion, in his own body.’

‘But is there nothing but work—mechanical work?’ said Gudrun.

‘Nothing but work!’ he repeated, leaning forward, his eyes two darknesses, with needle–points of light. ‘No, it is nothing but this, serving a machine, or enjoying the motion of a machine—motion, that is all. You have never worked for hunger, or you would know what god governs us.’

Gudrun quivered and flushed. For some reason she was almost in tears.

‘No, I have not worked for hunger,’ she replied, ‘but I have worked!’

‘Travaille—lavorato?’ he asked. ‘E che lavoro—che lavoro? Quel travail est–ce que vous avez fait?’

He broke into a mixture of Italian and French, instinctively using a foreign language when he spoke to her.

‘You have never worked as the world works,’ he said to her, with sarcasm.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have. And I do—I work now for my daily bread.’

He paused, looked at her steadily, then dropped the subject entirely. She seemed to him to be trifling.

‘But have YOU ever worked as the world works?’ Ursula asked him.

He looked at her untrustful.

‘Yes,’ he replied, with a surly bark. ‘I have known what it was to lie in bed for three days, because I had nothing to eat.’

Gudrun was looking at him with large, grave eyes, that seemed to draw the confession from him as the marrow from his bones. All his nature held him back from confessing. And yet her large, grave eyes upon him seemed to open some valve in his veins, and involuntarily he was telling.

‘My father was a man who did not like work, and we had no mother. We lived in Austria, Polish Austria. How did we live? Ha!—somehow! Mostly in a room with three other families—one set in each corner—and the W.C. in the middle of the room—a pan with a plank on it—ha! I had two brothers and a sister—and there might be a woman with my father. He was a free being, in his way—would fight with any man in the town—a garrison town—and was a little man too. But he wouldn’t work for anybody—set his heart against it, and wouldn’t.’

‘And how did you live then?’ asked Ursula.

He looked at her—then, suddenly, at Gudrun.