p for examinations, or she would perhaps.
have seriously studied some science, which might at least have been
effectual as an opiate in suppressing sensibility. She was, however, in
Eastthorpe before the new education, as it is called, had been invented.
There was no elaborate system of needle points, Roman and Greek history,
plain and spherical trigonometry, political economy, ethics, literature,
chemistry, conic sections, music, English history, and mental philosophy,
to draw off the electricity within her, nor did she possess the
invaluable privilege of being able, after studying a half-crown handbook,
to unbosom herself to women of her own age upon the position of Longland
as an English poet.

Shakespeare or Wordsworth might have been of some use to her, but to
Shakespeare she was not led, although there was a brown, dusty,
one-volume edition at the Terrace; and of Wordsworth nobody whom she knew
in Eastthorpe had so much as heard. A book would have turned much that
was vague in her into definite shape; it would have enabled her to
recognise herself; it would have given an orthodox expression to cloud
singularity, and she would have seen that she was a part of humanity in
her most extravagant and personal emotions. As it was, her position was
critical because she stood by herself, affiliated to nothing, an
individual belonging to no species, so far as she knew. She then met Mr.
Cardew. It was through him the word was spoken to her, and he was the
interpreter of the new world to her. She was in love with him--but what
is love? There is no such thing: there are loves, and they are all
different. Catharine's was the very life of all that was Catharine,
senses, heart, and intellect, a summing-up and projection of her whole
selfhood. He was more to her than she to him--was any woman ever so much
to a man as a man is to a woman? She was happy when she was near him.
When she was in ordinary Eastthorpe society she felt as a pent-up lake
might feel if the weight of its waters were used in threading needles,
but when Mr. Cardew talked to her, and she to him, she rejoiced in the
flow of all her force, and that horrible oppression in her chest
vanished.

Nevertheless, the fear, the shudder, came to her and not to him; the
wrench came from her and not from him. It was she and not he who watched
through the night and found no motive for the day, save a dull, miserable
sense that it was her duty to live through it.