Out in the High Road she boarded a passing tram, caring not whither it was going. She climbed to the top deck, which was uncovered, and sat on a seat that was filmed over with lately fallen snow. There was nobody else on the top deck, and the conductor, when she tendered him a penny without speaking, eyed her curiously. The car purred slowly along the High Road, stopping at all the old familiar halting-places, stopping sometimes because of men who were shovelling snow and slush into the gutters. Every time it stopped she could hear the driver on his platform beating his gloved hands together and swinging his arms noisily across his chest. It was very cold, and the wind swept down the wide High Road like a demon unchained. Overhead the trolley-wheel screamed shrilly along the wires, and every time it passed the supporting wire between the opposite tramway standards it gave a sharp, excruciating sound—like a little kiss. At the Ridgeway Corner there was a long wait, and the driver and conductor disappeared into a coffee-house by the roadside. Far ahead the High Road stretched grey and melancholy, with the snow and slush piled high along the gutters. The tram-rails were running rivulets, and each passing car sprayed the brown water over the roadway....
At High Wood the conductor climbed the steps and began turning the handle to alter the destination board of the car. Then he swung down the rope from the trolley-pole and said: “Don’t go beyond ’ere, miss.... Git a bus if yer want ter go any further....” Catherine clambered down. After all, she did not want to go any further. This was High Wood; she was quite near home....
The path through the Forest to “Elm Cottage” was ankle deep in mud and slush.... As she passed the clearing that was about half-way, she saw that the sky was grey with falling flakes. He had said: “I expect there will be some more skating to-night if it doesn’t snow.” But it was snowing now. There would be no skating. It did seem a pity. So many people would be disappointed.... She could see the smoke rising sluggishly from the chimney-pots of “Elm Cottage.” The footpath to the porch was white with untrodden snow....
In the drawing-room the first things she saw were the boxes of cigarettes which she had bought because she knew they were his favourite brand, and the Bach’s Fugue which she had learned because she knew he would like to hear it.
She sat down on the fender rail in front of the fire without removing any of her wraps. The fatness of a tear-off calendar on her bureau annoyed her by its unaccustomedness. It was the first day of a new year. The mantelshelf was stacked with Christmas and New Year cards, chiefly from people she did not know....
Oh, well, she told herself, if I was wrong, then I was wrong.... If he’s in love with Helen, then he’s in love with her. That’s all there is to it.... Anyway, it’s the sort of thing that might happen to anybody ... what’s happened to me, I mean....
She flung off her furs and muff on to the floor. Her feet were wet, despite goloshes. She removed her shoes and put on slippers. Then, as if impelled by a sense of duty, she picked up the furs and muff and carried them to the piano, laying them on the closed sound-board....
She was just tired, physically, mentally and spiritually....
Even she had realized the awful selfishness of her soul. It was that which was hurting her far more than she knew. She could not quite analyse her feelings. But Verreker’s attitude had made her terribly conscious of her own inferiority. It hurt her to think that he despised her. Her soul was rotten, there was no health in her.... There was a sense in which Verreker’s engagement to Helen gave her a ray of spiritual hope, even if it subjected her to fierce pangs of jealousy. If he were in love with Helen and not with herself, that would sufficiently explain his casualness towards her. And he could not, presumably, help being in love with Helen.... Being in love with Helen did not necessarily indicate that he despised her. She suddenly realized that if she were convinced that he despised her all the hope would vanish out of her life. His conviction of her unworthiness would prove to her finally that her life was not, in the truest sense, worth living. That he was not in love with her was a deep disappointment, a bitter blow, beyond all doubt, but it was at most an accident. But that he deliberately and calculatingly pierced the selfishness and baseness of her, and despised her utterly from the depths of his being, she could not bear to think of....
Fiercely she turned upon her inmost nature and examined it ruthlessly. The spectacle was appalling. Her soul was eaten up with selfishness and jealousy and conceit. Everything in her past life had been inspired by one or other of these three leading motives. One or other of them was the clue to nearly everything she had ever done, to nearly every attitude she had ever adopted, to nearly every relationship that had ever entered her life. Her escape from home, her episodes of friendship with George Trant, all were evidences of her love of self. Her past was strewn with the wreckage of things that could not live in the atmosphere of her own spiritual avarice. And now her friendship with Verreker had broken under the strain placed upon it. If he were in love with Helen really and truly she could bear it. But if she thought that he saw in her own soul all the rottenness that she could see, the impulse to kill herself would be overmastering. Her father had committed suicide....