§ 3
Yet platonism was her acknowledged ideal. She was curiously anxious in discussions with him to emphasize it, even to rhapsodize upon it, to pour scorn on the sentimentality that finds it unworkable. She strove to re-create herself on the lines of what she strangely imagined would be his ideal of womanhood. And somehow this re-creation of herself was inextricably bound up with the paramount necessity that their relations must be strictly platonic. She would show him (and herself) that she was capable of maintaining such a relationship. She found a savage pride in the restraints she was called upon to exercise. She took fierce delight in saying things which were not only not true, but which were like knife-thrusts directed against her own heart. Her life became interwoven with intrigue against herself. As time passed, the complexity of what she was attempting began to demand ruthless self-suppression and a constant cumulative duplicity. Some of the traits of her newly manufactured character she identified so thoroughly with herself that she almost forgot whether they were real or not. Some of the lies that she told and acted became as real to her as the truth. Moments came when her brain as well as her soul went reeling under the burden of the tangle she had herself created.
One of the cruellest moments of her life was when she realized for the first time that she was capable of jealousy. Hitherto she had extracted a kind of pleasure from the thought: However passionate I may be, I am not jealous. I am above that.... This supposed quality in her seemed to raise her emotions and her desires above the common level, and she was always grateful for any excuse to lift herself out of the world of ordinary passions and ordinary emotions. Her emotions lacerated her so much that she could not endure to think that she was one of millions suffering likewise. The communion of sorrow was no good to her. She wanted to be alone, to be unique, to be suffering more intensely than, or at any rate differently from the rest of the world. There was a subtle consolation in being a pioneer in experience.... And till now she had been able to think: My feelings cannot be quite the same as those of other people, because I am not jealous....
It came upon her with terrible lucidity that the only reason why she had not been jealous was that there had been nobody to be jealous of.... She was playing Chopin in a small West-end concert hall. Verreker and Helen Trant were seated in the front row. (Helen was now his stenographer, shorthand-typist and general amanuensis.) Just before she started to play she glanced down at the audience. She noticed Verreker and Helen, they were both bending their heads close together as if sharing some confidence; also, they were both smiling. And Catherine speculated: Has anything that I have ever said made him smile like that? ... She wanted to know what was the cause of their amusement. If she were with them she could ask. But here she was, condemned to play Chopin for an hour and a half, and by the end of the recital she knew that they would have probably forgotten the incident, even if she were to remind them of it. It was, no doubt, something ludicrously trivial and unimportant. Yet, whatever it was, it was being shared between Verreker and Helen. She did not come into it. And for a single blinding moment she felt angrily, contemptuously, vehemently jealous of Helen....
Then she was scornfully angry with herself. And bitterly humiliated besides. For the fact of her jealousy placed her immediately on a level with all the thousands of girls she passed every day in the streets—girls who did not give Chopin recitals at West-end concert halls.... She played Chopin automatically. All the while she was bitterly reproaching herself.
Is it possible, she speculated, to get jealous over a strictly platonic friendship? ...