§ 1
REACTION visited her. Walking along the sun-white pavements the next morning the self-revelation of the night before seemed incredibly absurd. It had rained during the night, and the cool scent of the gravel roadways seemed somehow to radiate the suggestion that life was cool and clear and fresh, to be taken light-heartedly and never to be feared. As she walked with springing step along the High Road, there seemed such an infinitude of interests in her life that she could afford to say: If I never saw him again it would not matter much. Every shop-window seemed bulging with reasons why, if she were never to see him again, it would not matter much. And when she stood by the counter in Burlington’s music emporium and leisurely scanned through piles of pianoforte music, she decided sincerely and clinchingly: It is impossible that I am in love with him.
In the few novels she had read, being in love had been symptomized by dreamy abstraction, random melancholy, a tendency to neglect worldly duties, a replacement of clear-cut ambitions by a nebulous ideal. This was not true of her. Three hours of Chopin practising awaited her when she returned, and she was looking forward to it eagerly, enthusiastically. Never were her ambitions so clear and business-like, never had she less time and inclination for dreamy abstraction and random melancholy.
The air was clean and clear as after a storm. She saw nothing but sheer absurdity in herself. She went back to Gifford Road and threw her whole soul into Chopin. That she was able to do so seemed to be convincing proof of what she desired to prove. She wrote half a dozen letters, and as she methodically stamped the envelopes one after another she thought: This is life! Not emotional fireworks, but the sheer methodical doing of one thing after another. And I am not in love.... From the businesslike stamping of her envelopes she extracted that subtle consolation. Somehow there existed in her the weird idea that being in love would militate against the successful stamping of envelopes. She was immensely, incalculably pleased at the decision she had come to. Thereafter, every action of hers confirmed it. When she went for a motor drive into the Forest and enjoyed it thoroughly, she thought: This shows that I cannot be in love. And when she played Chopin she felt vaguely: A person in love would not play Chopin like this.... She discovered that platonic friendship meant the friendship of men and women devoid of ulterior motives.... Henceforth she was a passionate disciple of platonism, ignorant of the fact that a disciple of platonism must never be passionate. She applied platonism thus: I can be friendly with him without being in love with him. I can be and shall be. He is capable of platonic friendship: so am I....