In their voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman.

They sounded also like strange machines, heavy, oiled.

The voluptuousness was like that of machinery, cold and iron.
It was the same every evening when she came home, she seemed to move through a wave of disruptive force, that was given off from the presence of thousands of vigorous, underworld, half-automatised colliers, and which went to the brain and the heart, awaking a fatal desire, and a fatal callousness.
There came over her a nostalgia for the place.

She hated it, she knew how utterly cut off it was, how hideous and how sickeningly mindless.
Sometimes she beat her wings like a new Daphne, turning not into a tree but a machine.

And yet, she was overcome by the nostalgia.