During one of their clandestine meetings, Winston begins to tell Julia about his former wife, Katharine, and the problems they had in their sex life (Part Two, Chapter III). Katharine was a very dutiful person and viewed sex as an obligation to the Party. Because she lacked imagination, she did not realize that her husband harbored any subversive thoughts or felt dissatisfied with their Party-controlled life. He realized that her limited range of thinking protected him, but he also resented her conformity. One afternoon, he tells Julia, the couple had been on a community hike and got separated from the Crowd. Being away from the group and unsure of their route back made Katherine very nervous. Their path took them along the edge of a quarry. While showing her some flowers growing out of a cranny, the urge to push her over the edge momentarily takes hold, but he resists. Julia asks him why did didn’t push Katharine over; “I would have,” he said. They discuss it for a few moments, and Winston concludes that her youth blocks her understanding: “she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.”
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