But she must move out of the intricately woven illusion of
her life: the illusion of a father whose life was an Odyssey in
an outer world; the illusion of her grandmother, of realities so
shadowy and far-off that they became as mystic
symbols:--peasant-girls with wreaths of blue flowers in
their hair, the sledges and the depths of winter; the
dark-bearded young grandfather, marriage and war and death; then
the multitude of illusions concerning herself, how she was truly
a princess of Poland, how in England she was under a spell, she
was not really this Ursula Brangwen; then the mirage of her
reading: out of the multicoloured illusion of this her life, she
must move on, to the Grammar School in Nottingham.
She was shy, and she suffered. For one thing, she bit her
nails, and had a cruel consciousness in her finger-tips, a
shame, an exposure. Out of all proportion, this shame haunted
her. She spent hours of torture, conjuring how she might keep
her gloves on: if she might say her hands were scalded, if she
might seem to forget to take off her gloves.
For she was going to inherit her own estate, when she went to
the High School. There, each girl was a lady. There, she was
going to walk among free souls, her co-mates and her equals, and
all petty things would be put away. Ah, if only she did not bite
her nails! If only she had not this blemish! She wanted so much
to be perfect--without spot or blemish, living the high,
noble life.
It was a grief to her that her father made such a poor
introduction. He was brief as ever, like a boy saying his
errand, and his clothes looked ill-fitting and casual. Whereas
Ursula would have liked robes and a ceremonial of introduction
to this, her new estate.
She made a new illusion of school. Miss Grey, the
headmistress, had a certain silvery, school-mistressy beauty of
character. The school itself had been a gentleman's house. Dark,
sombre lawns separated it from the dark, select avenue. But its
rooms were large and of good appearance, and from the back, one
looked over lawns and shrubbery, over the trees and the grassy
slope of the Arboretum, to the town which heaped the hollow with
its roofs and cupolas and its shadows.
So Ursula seated herself upon the hill of learning, looking
down on the smoke and confusion and the manufacturing, engrossed
activity of the town. She was happy. Up here, in the Grammar
School, she fancied the air was finer, beyond the factory smoke.
She wanted to learn Latin and Greek and French and mathematics.
She trembled like a postulant when she wrote the Greek alphabet
for the first time.
She was upon another hill-slope, whose summit she had not
scaled. There was always the marvellous eagerness in her heart,
to climb and to see beyond. A Latin verb was virgin soil to her:
she sniffed a new odour in it; it meant something, though she
did not know what it meant. But she gathered it up: it was
significant. When she knew that: x2-y2 = (x + y)(x-y) then she felt that she had grasped something, that she was
liberated into an intoxicating air, rare and unconditioned. And
she was very glad as she wrote her French exercise: "J'AI DONNE LE PAIN A MON PETIT FRERE."