bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper. "His
totem is the wolf," she repeated to herself. "His mother is
an old, unbroken wolf." And then she experienced a keen
paroxysm, a transport, as if she had made some incredible
discovery, known to nobody else on earth. A strange trans-
port took possession of her, all her veins were in a paroxysm
of violent sensation. "Good God!" she exclaimed to her-
self, "what is this?" And then, a moment after, she was
saying assuredly, "I shall know more of that man." She
was tortured with desire to see him again, a nostalgia, a necessity to see him again, to make sure it was not all a mistake,
that she was not deluding herself, that she really felt this
strange and overwhelming sensation on his account, this
knowledge of him in her essence, this powerful apprehension
of him. "Am I really singled out for him in some way, is
there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only
us two?" she asked herself. And she could not believe it,
she remained in a muse, scarcely conscious of what was going
on around.
The bridesmaids were here, and yet the bridegroom had not come. Ursula wondered if something was amiss, and if the wedding would yet all go wrong. She felt troubled, as if it rested upon her. The chief bridesmaids had arrived. Ursula watched them come up the steps. One of them she knew, a tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and pale, long face. This was Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches. Now she came along, with her head held up, balancing an enormous flat hat of pale yellow velvet, on which were streaks of ostrich feathers, natural and grey. She drifted forward as if scarcely conscious, her long blanched face lifted up, not to see the world. She was rich. She wore a dress of silky, frail velvet, of pale yellow colour, and she carried a lot of small rose-coloured cyclamens. Her shoes and stockings were of brownish grey, like the feathers on her hat, her hair was heavy, she drifted along with a peculiar fixity of the hips, a strange unwilling motion. She was impressive, in her lovely pale-yellow and brownish-rose, yet macabre, something repulsive. People were silent when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet for some
