In a dim, formless way she wished he might sprain his ankle or be taken ill so that she could wait on him and mother him. She wanted some excuse for touching his soft hair and his eyes and his beautiful bare feet.
But when his mates appeared suddenly round the corner of a bush he took up his jar and left her without a word.... Still, she was happy and smiling, though her flesh still crept at the thought of tadpoles.
Children were very nice ... especially boys.
But the maternal instinct was not very strong in her. It was only her loneliness that had intensified what of it that there was.
The thirteenth mazurka of Chopin filled her with strange ecstasy. It was so lonely....
§ 2
She became increasingly conscious of the defects of her education. Literature at the Bockley High School for Girls had meant a painful annual struggle through a play of Shakespeare and a novel of Sir Walter Scott. Catherine did not like either of these authors. The former she regarded secretly as an uninspired country gentleman who had industriously put into blank verse thoughts so obvious that nobody had ever previously deemed them worthy of mention. Such remarks as “Evil and good are mingled in our natures.” ... Her acquaintance with the immortal bard had been confined to that small residue left of his plays when the censoring hand of Miss Forsdyke had excluded (a) those plays which are too poor to be worth reading, and (b) those which are unsuitable for critical analysis in the Bockley High School for Girls. Of Scott, Catherine’s opinion was no higher. She found him woefully dull. And invariably she had to learn his glossaries at the end of the book.
The net result was that Catherine’s literary equipment comprised a few score obsolete words and idioms culled in an entirely stupid fashion from As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, and The Talisman. Of Lamb, Hazlitt, Landor, Rossetti, the Brontës, De Quincey, Fitzgerald and the modernists she knew nothing. She had been brought up with a vague prejudice that reading anything less than a hundred years old was wasting time. It seemed to her on the face of it quite inconceivable that people should ever equal Scott and Shakespeare. Though she liked neither of them, she was overwhelmed by the mighty consensus of opinion labelling them as the greatest masters (for school use) of the English language. Only rarely did she rebel, and then she thought vaguely: “Supposing all this Scott-and-Shakespeare-worship is a great organized conspiracy!” ...
Of French literature she knew nothing. Her study of the French language had not progressed beyond an ability to demand writing implements. (“Bring me pens, ink, writing-paper, a blotter and a stamp. What time does the next post go? Say: At what hour departs the next post?”) That the French language possessed a literature she was but dimly aware. Her ideas of France and the French were derived from various stage Frenchmen she had seen upon the boards of the Bockley Victoria Theatre. France was a nation of dapper little gesticulating men with Imperial beards, and heavily rouged girls who wore skirts a few inches shorter than on this side of the Channel, and said “Cheri?” She was a land of boulevards and open-air cafés, and absinthe and irreligion. Her national industry was adultery.
Partly to occupy her time when she was not practising the piano Catherine joined the Bockley Free Library. She read most of the Victorian poets, and was oppressed by the heavy sentimentality of Tennyson. But she was not really fond of reading; it was only loneliness that drove her to it. Only one of Dickens’ novels fascinated her, and that was Great Expectations. But for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights she had a passionate admiration.