This was the answer Hermione wanted. She turned satisfied to Birkin.
'What are you doing?' she sang, in her casual, inquisitive fashion.
'Catkins,' he replied.
'Really!' she said. 'And what do you learn about them?' She spoke all
the while in a mocking, half teasing fashion, as if making game of the
whole business. She picked up a twig of the catkin, piqued by Birkin's
attention to it.
She was a strange figure in the class-room, wearing a large, old cloak
of greenish cloth, on which was a raised pattern of dull gold. The high
collar, and the inside of the cloak, was lined with dark fur. Beneath
she had a dress of fine lavender-coloured cloth, trimmed with fur, and
her hat was close-fitting, made of fur and of the dull, green-and-gold
figured stuff. She was tall and strange, she looked as if she had come
out of some new, bizarre picture.
'Do you know the little red ovary flowers, that produce the nuts? Have
you ever noticed them?' he asked her. And he came close and pointed
them out to her, on the sprig she held.
'No,' she replied. 'What are they?' 'Those are the little seed-producing flowers, and the long catkins,
they only produce pollen, to fertilise them.' 'Do they, do they!' repeated Hermione, looking closely.
'From those little red bits, the nuts come; if they receive pollen from
the long danglers.' 'Little red flames, little red flames,' murmured Hermione to herself.
And she remained for some moments looking only at the small buds out of
which the red flickers of the stigma issued.
'Aren't they beautiful? I think they're so beautiful,' she said, moving
close to Birkin, and pointing to the red filaments with her long, white
finger.
'Had you never noticed them before?' he asked.
'No, never before,' she replied.
'And now you will always see them,' he said.
'Now I shall always see them,' she repeated. 'Thank you so much for
showing me. I think they're so beautiful--little red flames--' Her absorption was strange, almost rhapsodic. Both Birkin and Ursula
were suspended. The little red pistillate flowers had some strange,
almost mystic-passionate attraction for her.
The lesson was finished, the books were put away, at last the class was
dismissed. And still Hermione sat at the table, with her chin in her
hand, her elbow on the table, her long white face pushed up, not
attending to anything. Birkin had gone to the window, and was looking
from the brilliantly-lighted room on to the grey, colourless outside,
where rain was noiselessly falling. Ursula put away her things in the
cupboard.