§ 2
A time came when she told herself: I am changing.... She was becoming more serious, less impressionable. Or so, at any rate, it seemed. Conversations with him had given her intellect a stimulus. She read Shaw and Ibsen, not so much to give herself ideas (though that result was inevitable) as to provide fascinating topics of discussion with him. For in those days Shaw was a rising and Ibsen a waning star in the intellectual firmament. Platonism was ever in her mind. She and Verreker met with moderate frequency, for his position as her concert organizer involved much business intercourse. They talked music and politics and economics and literature, and always she was afraid of two things, lest the conversation might flag, and lest she might make some absurd remark which would betray the poverty of her knowledge. And yet when she managed to discuss with him intelligently she never imagined that she was deceiving him. She knew that he knew that all her knowledge was recently acquired, that her brain was only slightly above average, that she only imperfectly comprehended most of the topics she ventured remarks upon. An occasional remark of rank stupidity was almost inevitable under such conditions, and she knew it would not surprise him. He had no illusions about her which she could break. And yet the fear always hung over her when she was with him that some day she might say something irrevocably, catastrophically absurd. It was almost a relief to her when their meetings were over. The sensation was of having piloted a ship through a channel infested with rocks and succeeded somehow or other. Yet there was pleasure in the exercise. And she treasured up certain things he said, not for their intrinsic value, but because she had made him say them....
She was quite sincere and enthusiastic about the platonic basis of their friendship. She almost sentimentalized about it. She deified it till it shone with a flame infinitely more dazzling than that of love. She despised love. Love was elemental. Basically, it was animal: she watched the couples strolling at twilight beneath the trees of the Ridgeway, and saw nothing in them but the primitive male seeking the primitive female. The poetry, the idyllic quality fell from the amorousness of men and women and revealed it to her as something of sheer brute passion. (A cold douche from one of Shaw’s plays had assisted this transformation.) She felt herself consciously superior to these couples. She speculated on their thoughts, their conversations, their sympathies, and she almost despised them because their thoughts were not high, nor their conversations intellectual, nor their sympathies complex. She felt: the further and higher mankind develops the less prominence will be given to the merely brutish and physical aspect of passion. Until there shall at last be evolved the Higher Love, which is the union of twin affinities, indissolubly one by community of thought and sympathy and ideal. (This, by the way, she had read somewhere, and her mind seized hold of it greedily.) She could not conceive of Verreker and herself as man and wife. But as twin-souls their future seemed promising; and the strictly platonic nature of their association was consecrated by the application of the twin-soul theory. She diligently read abstruse, religious-cum-psychological works on the subject. She became possessed with a fierce enthusiasm for masculine camaraderie. Men, she thought, are easily able to enjoy delightful and perfectly platonic friendships with both men and women. Men have a greater capacity for friendship than women. They are less intensely sexual. They have a glorious sense of camaraderie which is as the breath of a gale over uplands. Whereas women are narrower, more passionate, maybe, in what attachments they do make, but incapable of realizing the male ideal of comradeship. She admired men for their wider and more spacious outlook on life. She became fond of the novels of Michael Fairless and Jack London. And, as a sort of reaction, she was profoundly affected by reading The Hill, Vachell’s Harrow school story of a great friendship. Then she got hold of Wells’ Passionate Friends, and it thrilled her by its seeming applicability to her own life. She felt, with some superiority: Most people would not understand this book. They would condemn it as unreal, exotic, untrue to life. But I understand it and know that it is very real and very true.... There were sentences in Wuthering Heights which she treasured as enshrining her ideal in words of passionate epigram. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” was one of them. “I am Heathcliff!” she could scarcely read without poignant emotion. The enigma of Emily Brontë’s life made her construct many theories to account for the peculiar passion of Wuthering Heights....
Sometimes she would think proudly: This is an amazing friendship. We are people in a million. We are immeasurably higher in the human scale than those to whom such a relation as exists between us would be incomprehensible and incredible. It is not love that binds us—that reckless fuser of incompatibilities—it is an affinity of soul, rare, intense, exquisitely subtle....
And also there were moments of terrible lucidity, when the subtleties and complexities resolved themselves into a single pattern of tragic simplicity. She loved him and he did not love her. The relation between them was compounded of nothing but that. Everything else was artificial and a sham....