At length they roused and set out. No longer they existed in the unblemished darkness. There was the glitter of a bridge, the twinkle of lights across the river, the big flare of the town in front and on their right.

But still, dark and soft and incontestable, their bodies walked untouched by the lights, darkness supreme and arrogant.

“The stupid lights,” Ursula said to herself, in her dark sensual arrogance. “The stupid, artificial, exaggerated town, fuming its lights.

It does not exist really. It rests upon the unlimited darkness, like a gleam of coloured oil on dark water, but what is it? — nothing, just nothing.”

In the tram, in the train, she felt the same. The lights, the civic