PART TWO

I

AND now the Addingtons came into our lives. For the next few years they were part of all we did and thought. They were part of our life. It used to seem odd, during those next years, to realize we had known them so short a time. As soon as we knew them it seemed as though we had always been friends. I think that the Addingtons were about the best people I have known. They were so dear, too, and so true.

Of most people, even people I love very much, I feel that they might in certain circumstances act wrongly or from some bad motive; but with George and Mollie one felt from the beginning absolutely sure that they never would. There was a sort of solid nobility in them both that nothing could shake or alter. They were unlike each other in a great many ways. George was much cleverer than Mollie, much more amusing and more whimsical, but in this essential quality they were the same, and it was this, I think, that attracted Hugo so strongly to them first, and then Guy, and then me. I suppose we three in our different ways all rather lacked this quality. But Guy lacked it less than Hugo and me.

George had been at Winchester with Guy and Hugo, but they had hardly known him there, for he was a scholar, and they were not. It was when they met again at New College that they became friends, chiefly Hugo and George at first, and then Guy too; and Mollie was at college too in Oxford at that time.

The first time I met them was in Hugo’s room at New College. He had a room that looked out on the old wall and a wonderful double cherry tree. It was a clear spring day, and the cherry tree was in full bloom.

It was a big room, and Hugo had had it redecorated. It had white walls and grey paint and no pictures at all (that was a phase that Hugo went through; later on he had pictures again). There were books in a long grey bookcase, and a plain grey carpet, and in one corner a big bronze cast of the Delphic Charioteer. The whole room was planned to suit that, and I think it did. There was a sort of plainness about it, an absence of ornamentation and extras of any sort, that was like the straight folds of the charioteer’s drapery. That was Hugo’s idea, as he explained it.

The curtains were bright Egyptian blue, and the only other colour was from flowers, sometimes blue, sometimes red, as the mood took him, in two tall glass vases on the chimney-piece. Hugo delighted in his room. It was the first time he had designed one for himself, for his room at Yearsly had evolved itself gradually, and was not planned out as a whole.

There were grey arm-chairs, plain to look at but very comfortable, and an oval table of dark mahogany with a blue bowl in the middle.

Later, his pianola was there too, and the room modified its severity a little, but in essentials it remained the same, Even afterwards in London his room was very like it, and I think in its later, more modified form, the room was like Hugo.

Their grandfather had left a special £100 each, to be given to Guy and Hugo on their twenty-first birthdays. Guy had bought a hunter with his; Hugo bought a pianola. He used to play on it a great deal, chiefly Mozart. About the time he was twenty-one Hugo had a passion for Mozart. He would go up to London for Mozart concerts, and sometimes got into trouble for this, and he read everything he could about him. It used to remind me of Sophia Lane Watson and her passion for Shelley. I never had passions of that sort, nor did Guy.

All this, however, was later. That day when I met the Addingtons was in his first year, and he was not yet twenty. Old furniture and Donne, and George Addington, were his chief interests at this time.

I had come up to stay with a Mrs. Peters who had known my mother. Mr. Peters was a Don and had been coaching Guy. It was the first time I had been to Oxford, for before this I had always been at school, and it seemed to me a wonderful place. I don’t know how it is that it seems so different now. Guy and Hugo had been to lunch at the Peters’. Then they took me out and showed me places, and we walked about colleges, and in New College Cloister, and I felt it a place like a dream. It always used to seem like that when I visited Guy and Hugo, and I was often there during the next few years.

Now I try sometimes to see it like that again, but I cannot. I can only remember as a fact that I once felt it so, and I wonder how it was.

Hugo had talked about George Addington at Christmas, and I longed to see him.

‘He is such a splendid fellow,’ he had said, ‘and such a wonderful mind.’

‘And such jolly good company,’ said Guy.

I was rather disappointed when I first saw him. He and Mollie were waiting for us in Hugo’s room when we came in. There was a big fire burning, and hot cakes standing down in covered dishes on the hob, and tea all waiting on the round polished table. Outside the sun was shining, a thin, cold sun, and it slanted in through the window and mixed with the firelight.

The china teapot with the birds on it was there on the table, and there was a feeling of warmth and comfort in the room. I believe now that it was Mollie who made it feel so comfortable, but then I only thought ‘What a delightful room!’

She was doing something to the kettle when we came in. I think it had boiled over and she was setting it back again on the coals.

Her back was to us, and I saw George first. He jumped up from the grey arm-chair.

‘Late again, of course, Hugo. We had almost left in a rage!’

Hugo laughed and said:

‘Here is my cousin Helen, and you can’t be cross with me.’

George came forward and shook hands. He was smiling, and I thought he had a pleasant face, but I had expected some one more striking and impressive, and so I was disappointed.

George was too short, and beside Guy and Hugo he looked still shorter. He had grey eyes, not dark romantic grey like Guy and Cousin Delia, but an ordinary blue grey colour, and his hair was mouse colour, rather fair than dark. He had a broad forehead and very straight eyebrows, rather close over his eyes. He was not at all what I had expected.

Of Mollie I had heard less, but I liked her as soon as she spoke. She had a pretty voice, very sweet, and like herself.

She struck me as much bigger than George. I believe she was actually about an inch taller, but she had the same forehead and level eyebrows and grey eyes. These straight brows were characteristic of them both. Her hair was fairer than his, and there was more colour in her face. It has often puzzled me to define why Mollie was not pretty. Her features were well cut and even, and her colouring very pleasant, yet she did not strike one as pretty. One got to love her face and her charming, rather boyish smile, but with both her and George you did not see at first how special they were. Some people never saw, and that used to make me angry.

She was dressed in blue that afternoon. I think it was a blue homespun. I know it seemed just the right colour in that room.

I made the tea in the coloured teapot, and we all sat round the fire and had tea.

Later Mrs. Peters came in. She had to be there as a chaperone, or Mollie would not have been allowed to come. I thought they were joking when they said this, but it was true. It seemed to me a funny idea.

II

Mollie and George Addington had no parents. Their mother had died when they were tiny children and their father when Mollie was sixteen. He had been in business in Manchester; a cotton business of some sort, and they were brought up in a suburb of Manchester, in a big ugly red house a few miles out of the town. Mollie once showed me some photographs of their house, and it seemed to me odd that George and Mollie should come from a place like that. It was not like them at all. They were rather rich and had a motor-car long before every one did. Their father was interested in politics, and a Liberal. He used to read articles from the _Manchester Guardian_ aloud to them in the evenings, and later on when they were older they used to read them to him. It was chiefly Mollie that did the reading; imports and exports and rates of exchange. I asked Mollie once if she had hated all that reading aloud, and she looked surprised.

‘No—not particularly,’ she said. ‘It never occurred to me to hate it, and I was sorry for Father.’

Mollie went to a High School in Manchester. She went in by train with her father in the mornings, and came back alone after tea.

George used to go to a day school too at first, and then he got his Winchester scholarship and went away. Mr. Addington was quite well off, but he had said from the beginning that George should not go to a public school if he did not get a scholarship.

‘And so I got it,’ said George with his broad smile. ‘I don’t suppose I should have, except for that. Father was like that; he was grim, and he made people do things.’

Mollie looked after them both. I think she would have looked after them anyhow, but her father put her definitely in charge of the house when she was fourteen. She was given the keys of the store-cupboard and the domestic cash-box, and three months later the housekeeper was dismissed. ‘I will give you three months’ apprenticeship,’ her father had said. ‘You will do the housekeeping with Miss Hopkins at first, then under her supervision, and at the end of three months you should be competent to undertake it without help.’

He gave her eight pounds a week, and she had to account for every penny she spent. On the first of each month there was an ‘audit day’ when she brought her account-book into the study and handed over to her father all the receipted bills. Everything had to be paid in cash, and she might not leave one penny unaccounted for. At first there were many discrepancies. She forget to enter tram-fares; sometimes she gave pennies to beggars and forgot to put them down. Her father was patient with her, she said. He would go over the whole account, checking each item to see if the missing pennies could be traced. Sometimes they could not, and he would write ‘3_d_. unaccounted for’ across the foot of the page. He did not punish her when this happened, but she felt it a disgrace, and sometimes she would cry about it in bed.

This did not happen often after the first year, and Mollie was a wonderfully capable person when I knew her.

Afterwards, when I tried to do accounts and couldn’t, I used to wonder if I should have learnt better if I had been trained to do it by Mollie’s father, but I don’t suppose it would have made much difference really.

Mr. Addington was a Unitarian and a teetotaller. George and Mollie used to go to a big chapel with Morris windows, and they were put into a ‘Band of Hope’ when they were eight years old, and signed ‘pledge cards’ to say they would never drink alcoholic drinks. When she was fifteen Mollie had to teach in the Band of Hope. She had to give lessons on the effects of Alcohol on the Human Body, and her father gave her books to read about it in. All this seemed very odd to us when we first got to know the Addingtons. It was so different a world from ours, and yet the Addingtons were like us in fundamental things.

Mollie showed me her ‘pledge card’ once. It had a picture of St. George fighting the Dragon, by Walter Crane, on it, and some rather fine texts round the sides. It seemed to me a queer, barbarous idea, like ‘unclean meat,’ or some old primitive taboo.

Mollie laughed when I said so.

She said:

‘I suppose it is. I should never make my own children sign anything like that, but I somehow didn’t like to give it up. I feel a sort of loyalty to Father. I don’t think it matters, but he did; if he was alive I think I should tell him I didn’t agree any more and give him back the card. But as he is dead I can’t. Perhaps that’s rather silly, but after all, there’s no strong reason the other way.’

George was not a teetotaller when we knew him. He had felt like Mollie for a time, he said, after their father’s death, and then he definitely broke through the feeling of taboo, as something irrational to which one should not give in.

‘_Magnus pater sed maior veritas_,’ he said, and Hugo laughed at him, and said he was a Puritan in his negation of Puritanism.

Neither George nor Mollie had remained Unitarians. Mollie’s scientific mind had overcome her loyalty here; also, as she herself told me, Mr. Addington’s religion had been far less vital to him than his political and social creed.

They were both Liberals, and this seemed to me the oddest of all. To Hugo too it seemed odd, but not so much to Guy. I believe that with a different environment Guy might have been a politician. It had always been a joke against Guy that he liked to read the newspaper; not just reviews or headlines, but the solid political articles. But even he had no particular party, and it was the party that seemed so curious to Hugo and to me. To suppose that one could agree, always, on all points, with one group of people, and that one must support one party.

‘How can you agree always with one group of people?’ Hugo asked George one day, in a punt.

‘I don’t always agree on every point,’ said George, ‘but mainly, on the most important questions.’

‘But you might agree with one party on one important point, and another on another. What would you do then?’

‘That doesn’t often happen, as a matter of fact. But if it does, I suppose one would go with the party one agreed with on most points. You must work together with some group if you want to get things done.’

‘Yes, getting things done. That’s the whole difficulty. I doubt, you see, whether this getting anything done is worth the intellectual dishonesty involved in it.’

George laughed.

‘But if you see something very wrong going on, a child working in a mine, or something like that, you want to do something about it. You want to stop it.’

‘No,’ said Hugo after a pause. ‘I am afraid I don’t. I only want to run away and not look.’

George laughed again.

‘I don’t believe that,’ he said, ‘I am afraid that is “intellectual dishonesty” on your part, Hugo. You don’t like to own to an ordinary good impulse.’

Then we all laughed, Hugo too. But he added presently:

‘It would not be a good impulse even if I did try to stop a child working in a mine; it would only be another sort of selfishness, removing something that was disagreeable to see.’

And George rejoined:

‘But I never said the Liberal Party was unselfish. I never suggested the motive that made them want to remove abuses. I only said they did want to!’

And so it would go on. I used to be interested listening to their arguments. I agreed most with Hugo, but what George said made things stand out quite differently from the way I had thought of them before. Chiefly, though, what interested me, was the fact that George and Mollie should be Liberals themselves. I had taken it for granted that political parties were silly; George and Mollie were not at all silly. That was more convincing to me than arguments on either side.

George was a few months younger that Hugo, Mollie a few months older than Guy. George and Hugo were in their first year at Oxford, Mollie and Guy in their third.

They were all together a great deal during the next two years, and the Addingtons came to stay at Yearsly in the vacations.

Once Guy and Hugo went to stay with them in Manchester, and once I did, but that house never seemed to belong to them as their rooms in London did.

When Mollie had finished at college they left the Manchester home and moved to London, to the flat in Chelsea which seemed afterwards so much a part of them and of our life in the next few years.

There had been a suggestion at one time that I should go to college. If my mother had been at home I expect I should have gone; but Cousin Delia had a slight inclination against the idea, and my grandmother also, and as I was undecided myself the balance turned against.

If I could have been there with Mollie it would have been different, but she would have left almost as I arrived, and after she had left I saw much more of her in London; and Hugo I should hardly have seen in term time. To be there with him, and rules keeping us apart, I should have hated; and I had had enough of being in a herd of other girls.

So after Christmas I was sent abroad, to a French family first, and then a German.

I stayed five months with each and came back for the summer in between.

It was dull with those families. I had thought it would be exciting to go abroad, but it wasn’t. They were kind people, but they never left me alone. I was taken about to museums and galleries and looked after all the time. It was almost less free than school.

When I came back, Mollie had left Oxford. She took only three years there, and went on with her biology in London.

I lived in term time with my grandmother again, and went to classes and lectures at Bedford College. I learned Italian and went on with my music, and Mollie came very often to Campden Hill, and I went to her in Chelsea; sometimes I would meet her at the laboratory where she worked, and we had lunch in an A.B.C.

Often, too, we went to Oxford and saw Guy and Hugo and George. We stayed in lodgings in St. John’s Street, generally from Friday till Monday, and we would go long walks, all together, over Shotover sometimes and a long way on towards Otmoor, or sometimes along the Upper River past Godstow and Bablockhythe. There was a ferry there that we used to cross. It was in autumn or winter, that walk. I remember it chiefly with a red frosty sun. And in the summer we would go up the Cherwell in canoes; right up beyond the branching of the rivers, to a place where the willows met overhead and their shadows met together in the water.

III

It was on one of these picnics that I met Walter. George had invited him; it was generally George that brought new people in. He was more interested in different sorts of people than Guy and Hugo.

We were waiting in Guy’s room to start for the picnic. He had rooms in Broad Street then, looking on to the Sheldonian Theatre. George came in and said:

‘I’ve invited Sebright to come too. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘Well, I suppose not,’ said Guy. ‘He is a dull dog.’

‘Who is Sebright?’ asked Mollie.

‘Oh, he is the star of New College,’ said Guy. ‘He’s got all the pots this year—Ireland, Hertford, Gaisford. I don’t know what all—and looks like a mouse.’

‘No, not a mouse,’ corrected George, ‘more buttoned up than a mouse.’

‘Well, a stick then—a burnt stick;’ and Guy laughed.

‘I like him,’ said George, ‘and I am rather sorry for him too. What do you think, Hugo?’

Hugo was sitting on the table. He smiled his vague absent-minded smile.

‘Do you know, I don’t believe I’ve ever thought about him,’ he said, and we all laughed at Hugo.

He did not come for thirty-five minutes. That was like Walter too—just to spoil it by keeping every one waiting too long. Hugo was late very often, but no one minded it in Hugo. In Walter they did, but I suppose that was not Walter’s fault.

Guy kept saying:

‘I shall tell him what I think of him,’ and looking out of the window.

He was in a hurry when he did come. Guy saw him first, coming across the Broad from New College Lane. I looked out too and saw him, but he was running and I could only see a figure scurrying along past the corner of the Sheldonian. Then we heard him on the stairs. He was coming upstairs very fast, and stumbled on a loose rod or something at the top. We heard a great scrabble and bump, and then he tumbled against the door and came in.

‘I am sorry,’ he began, ‘awfully sorry I was late.’

He looked round, rather timidly, I thought—but Walter wasn’t timid really. ‘I had to finish some things.’ He was blinking, for the sun shone straight in through the window into his eyes, and the staircase was dark.

I remember him very distinctly as he stood there; his light blue eyes and the iron-rimmed spectacles, and the greenish Norfolk jacket that didn’t seem to fit anywhere, and the grey flannel trousers, baggy at the knees, and his fair hair, very straight and lanky, one lock of it flopping down over his forehead. His mouth I noticed even then, rather wide and thin-lipped; a sensitive, rather beautiful mouth, and he had beautiful hands, but that I did not notice till much later.

I felt then chiefly amused at him. He looked so funny blinking there in the sun, and I knew that Guy was very much annoyed with him, and equally well, that he would not say anything at all.

‘You didn’t tell me you couldn’t come at half-past two,’ said George mildly.

‘No—I’m awfully sorry—I didn’t think it would take so long; I had something to finish.’

‘All right, we’ll come along now,’ said Guy. ‘This is my cousin Miss Woodruffe, and Miss Addington.’

Walter bowed jerkily at us, and we all went downstairs and out.

IV

It is strange about that picnic; I remember so little about it. It merges in my mind into so many others. I remember that we went up the Cherwell; a long way up, past Water Eaton and under Islip Bridge, and that we had tea and supper, and came back late; but all that was the same as many other picnics, and I cannot remember anything distinctive about this one, except being in a canoe with Walter for a part of the time, and finding him hard to talk to.

It is curious to realize that it made so little impression on my mind when it made so much on his. He told me afterwards that he had hesitated about coming. He wanted to finish a bit of work that afternoon, and then George ran into him in the quad and asked him to come.

‘Half-past two at Guy Laurier’s rooms,’ George had said, and he had answered: ‘Oh, thanks awfully. I’d love to come,’ and gone on to his room, thinking; ‘I needn’t go, after all, if I don’t want to. I’ll wait and see what I feel like when the time comes.’

And he had gone back to his own room and worked at Demosthenes all the morning. By lunch-time he had almost finished what he was doing. He had lunch in his own room, and then went on with the work. He heard the clock strike two, and remembered George, but he said to himself: ‘I needn’t decide yet. I don’t think I will go.’

Then he got intent on his work, and really forgot when it was half-past. When he came to a pause it was nearly three; he looked at his watch and remembered George again.

‘The Lauriers and their cousin and my sister,’ George had said.

Walter was shy of girls, especially the kind of girls he imagined us to be, and he had even then a sort of prejudice against Guy and Hugo.

He says that he was irritated by their air of superiority, when he knew they had nothing to be superior about. But I believe he was attracted by them too, and annoyed with himself for being attracted. He says that he decided first that it was too late to go, and then thought, ‘If I don’t go, it will be because I am afraid of them, and afraid of going at the wrong time’; and that decided him the other way. As soon as he decided to go he became in a great hurry, and ran all the way down New College Lane. He said he felt a fool when he tumbled on the stairs, and he said he knew we thought him funny. That made me ashamed, for I had not supposed he would see what we thought at all. That was always happening, though, with Walter. He seemed so stupid at times, as though he didn’t understand anything one was feeling or thinking at all, and then long afterwards one found out that he had understood quite a lot.

He said that he looked at me as he came into the room, and that he thought me beautiful, and different from anything he had ever seen before. Of course poor Walter had not seen many women before besides his mother and Maud, and of course I was quite different from them—and that then he wished that he had not come. He said that he felt suddenly that his clothes were all wrong, and he remembered that he had not brushed his hair before he came out, and that for the first time in his life he wished he was different from what he was, handsomer and smarter, and more like what he despised as a rule.

‘I blessed George Addington,’ he said afterwards, when he was talking to me about that afternoon. ‘He was the only person who made me feel at ease. I forget now what he said—something quite ordinary—but I didn’t feel he was sizing me up and not quite liking me, as I did with the rest of you.’

He said that he went a long way with me in a canoe and that we talked about New College and the windows in the Chapel, and that he was impressed by my knowledge of stained glass.

That too is funny, for I never knew much about glass, nor was much interested in it, and I don’t remember talking about it at all.

He says that I was kind to him, not snubby or supercilious as he had expected. Why he should have expected that I can’t understand. Neither Guy nor Hugo was snubby, and certainly not George.

He was afraid I should be annoyed at going in the boat with him. I don’t suppose I minded which boat it was. We were all quite near together as far as I remember, and I was very happy on those picnics.

He said that he felt envious of Guy and Hugo because they were often with me, and he felt they were not good enough for me: ‘Just the idle commoner type,’ he called them—and that I was better than that. He knew even at the time he told me that he had been wrong about them; he got to understand something of them both in the end, but never very much. He was never fair to them, nor they to him, but they realized it more than he did.

At that time, too, he thought me much cleverer than I am.

Walter could not care for anyone whom he did not think clever, and he did care for me. He has told me how he went back to his rooms after that picnic and stood by the window in the dark, and said to himself over and over again:

‘I am in love—I am in love with Helen Woodruffe,’ and that he could not sleep that night, but walked about his room till early morning. It seems curious to me when he was feeling so much I should have felt so little; that I should have had no notion of what was going on in his mind.

I suppose it was like Hugo. I had just not been thinking about him.

V

Guy went down from Oxford at the end of that term. He took a First Class in History, and then started reading for the Bar.

It always annoyed Walter that Guy had got a first, for Walter felt these distinctions very important. He used to talk of people as first-class intellects or ‘the sort of man who might get a Second in History,’ and I know he considered Guy should belong to the second group. He said once that he didn’t think much of the Oxford History School, because such obviously second-rate people could get firsts in it, and I thought he was thinking of Guy.

I never could see that it mattered very much, or meant very much. George got a first too in his examination, ‘Greats,’ which was the same that Walter did himself, and Hugo only a second. Walter used to say of Hugo later on that he was good material wasted; that he might have been the scholar type if he had ever been taught to work.

Hugo liked the work he did for that examination. He read a lot of Greek philosophy and got excited about it. He used to read it to me in the vacations at Yearsly and translate it as we went along. We read Plato like that one summer, lying in the hay, one particular ‘pike’ of hay, on the way to the Temple. It was wonderful stuff, and the idea of one’s ideas and thoughts being as real as the actual world pleased both of us. I had always felt that, and so did Hugo, but I did not know that serious people thought so too.

Hugo said he would teach me Greek, and we began it that summer, and we went to see Greek plays in London; but I didn’t get very far, and we gave it up after a while, and I read the translations instead.

Guy took some rooms in Clifford’s Inn. He took four rooms, for Hugo was to come and live there too when he went down. Hugo meant at this time to go into the Civil Service.

There had been a great deal of discussion about Hugo’s career. Cousin John had wanted him to go into the Diplomatic Service, but Hugo did not want that. He could not be always so polite, he said, and that made us all laugh, for it was a joke against Hugo that he was too polite; that he could not be rude or disagreeable to anyone, and sometimes people were annoyed with him because of it, because they thought he had agreed with them when he had not.

Then he thought he would like to be a Curator in a museum, in the South Kensington Museum if possible. But George Addington was going in for the Civil Service as soon as he had finished at Oxford, and it was his idea, I think, that Hugo should do so too.

That next Easter we were all in London: George with Mollie, and Hugo with Guy. They all came to Campden Hill Square. Grandmother made them welcome.

They came and went when they liked, and so did I. It was wonderful, I think now, how she managed with us all. We felt perfectly free, we were free, and yet I believe she knew all that was going on, and was watching us and thinking about us a great deal.

In these later years I got to know my grandmother much better. She had seemed, when one was a child, a little alarming, much farther off than Cousin Delia. I don’t think she cared for children naturally, as Cousin Delia did, but now we were older she understood us more, and we her, and we found that she was not alarming at all, but very witty, and full of vitality, and interested in everything that went on.

She was much more lively than Cousin Delia, and I suppose more intellectual.

She read a great deal. Every night when she went to bed she used to read for two hours or more, every sort of book. She had read the French, Italian and English poets, but she did not care much for poetry. She had read the Fathers of the Church and the German Mystics, but she did not care for religion. What she enjoyed most, I think, were the French Encyclopædists, and the French eighteenth-century memoirs. She was, I used to think, very like an eighteenth-century great lady.

When Guy and Hugo came to meals, or George and Mollie, she talked to them quite frankly and simply as though they were contemporaries of her own, but afterwards, almost always, she would go up to her own sitting-room, she had a big sitting-room of her own at the top of the house, and leave them downstairs with me. There was no fuss about it. We never felt hurt that she did not want us, nor yet that she was hurt at our not wanting her. There was no beating about the bush with Grandmother.

‘Aunt Gerry is wonderful,’ Guy once said. ‘It is like talking to a man when you talk to her, not to an old lady.’

She was fonder of Guy than of Hugo. I sometimes thought her a little impatient with Hugo, but I think she loved him too in her own undemonstrative way. George and Mollie pleased her very much.

‘They are refreshing,’ she said the first time they had come to the house. ‘They do me good’; and after a pause while she was polishing her spectacles she put them on, and added, looking at me: ‘I did not know Hugo had so much good sense.’

She meant, I knew, as to choose such sensible friends, and also a little to tease me, for she thought me too uncritical of Hugo. So I only laughed and said: ‘Perhaps it was they who had the good sense,’ and she laughed too and said: ‘Perhaps it was.’

I had defended Hugo at first when she criticized him. That had amused her, and she did it more, but she never was unkind about him. She never said things that really hurt either him or me.

VI

It was that Easter that Hugo met Paulina Connell. He saw her first in _The Tempest_. She was playing Miranda, and she did it very well.

We were all there. Guy and George and Mollie and I. We all enjoyed the performance, and we all thought Miranda charming, but Hugo was bowled over.

‘Isn’t it lovely? isn’t it lovely?’ he kept saying. ‘I think that Miranda is quite perfect. She is just what Miranda should be.’

We knew that that was high praise from Hugo, for _The Tempest_ was one of his favourite plays at this time.

We went back to Guy’s rooms in Clifford’s Inn and had coffee and biscuits, and George began to chaff Hugo about his enthusiasm for Miranda, but Hugo was serious.

‘I want to see her,’ he said. ‘I must get to know her.

How beauteous Mankind is! Oh brave new world That has such people in’t!

Didn’t she do that divinely?’

‘I shouldn’t get to know her if I were you, Hugo,’ said George. ‘She will probably be a disillusionment. Let her remain the “stuff that dreams are made of.”’

Mollie was laughing and I laughed too, but I didn’t like it. It gave me an odd little pain to watch Hugo as he talked about her and then I felt ashamed of myself.

Hugo did get to know Paulina. He found that Anthony Cowper knew some one who knew her, and Anthony Cowper’s friend took Hugo and him to call one Sunday afternoon.

Hugo told us all about it when they came back. She was just as lovely in private life, he said. She lived with her mother in a flat in Battersea. Her father was dead and she had one brother, called Victor, who was a professional singer. Hugo did not see him, for he was touring somewhere. Mr. Connell had been in business, Mrs. Connell said, but it was an army family—“‘military people, you know, and well connected.”’

It was Anthony Cowper who reported the conversation. Hugo blushed a little and laughed.

‘So hard on dear Paulina,’ Mrs. Connell had said to Anthony, ‘to have to go on the stage—not that it was a penance at all to her, for if ever a girl had a passion for her art it was Paulina; but of course you understand, Mr. Cowper, it is not the sort of profession her father’s family would approve at all. My family is different, you see. We are all artists—artists to the finger-tips—and you understand, Mr. Cowper, to an artist social distinctions do not exist. But I do feel it hard for Paulina. . . . Yes, of course, her father’s relations do _not_ take the interest in her which one might have expected.’

Anthony Cowper was a mimic, and he made us laugh very much when he described the interview with Mrs. Connell; and now and again he turned to Hugo and said: ‘It was just like that, Hugo, wasn’t it?’ and Hugo admitted with good humour that it was.

‘She was rather a terror,’ he agreed. ‘But Paulina was quite different, and she didn’t like it much, I thought.’

Hugo gave a tea-party in Guy’s rooms before he went back to Oxford. He invited us all to meet Paulina, and Mrs. Connell came too.

‘I had to ask her too,’ he explained, ‘for she said she did not allow Paulina to go out alone.’

Paulina was beautiful; that was true. She was very fair, with bright, golden hair, very straight and smooth and shining, and serious blue eyes. She had red lips, curved and rather like a Rossetti saint. She was dressed in white, with white furs, and she did not talk very much. She sat looking beautiful and statuesque, and made rather solemn remarks from time to time.

‘It is only in the true Socialist State that art will be duly recognized,’ she said, and at another time: ‘True art has no need for subterfuge.’

What she meant I didn’t know, for I only caught scraps of the conversation. Guy and Anthony Cowper were talking to her—but I felt convinced somehow that she didn’t really know what she meant herself that she was repeating things she had learnt from somebody else, and that annoyed me, for I had never liked that sort of person.

She always talked about Art. Once she said:

‘I live for my Art. A true artist must’; and it sounded silly. A ‘true artist’ would never have said it, I felt sure.

She was talking to Guy when she said that, and Guy was very funny with her. He looked serious too, and said:

‘Really. How interesting. I suppose it is awfully hard work to be a true artist.’

And she answered in a sombre sort of way:

‘A crucifixion at times, but one cannot escape one’s destiny.’

‘Oh no; one can’t,’ agreed Guy. ‘Awfully hard luck, isn’t it?’

Guy saw me watching them and his eyes twinkled. He had a trick of raising one eyebrow, the left, when he was amused.

Mrs. Connell said to Hugo:

‘Paulina is so sensitive—the artistic temperament all through. Modern life is very hard for the artist.’

Hugo murmured something sympathetic. He wanted to talk to Paulina.

Mollie crossed the room and talked to Mrs. Connell. I saw Mrs. Connell pouring out a long confidence, and Mollie nodding her head from time to time.

George came over to me.

‘Are you impressed, Helen?’ he asked with his wide smile. ‘Does the goddess thrill you?’

I said:

‘No, I am afraid she doesn’t. I liked her better at a distance.’

‘Poor old Hugo,’ said George. ‘He is a dear goose, you know—but I don’t think we need worry.’

I felt extraordinarily grateful to George for saying that. It seemed somehow to make it all right. I had been afraid all day, and before that day; an uncomfortable, unformulated fear that something had been going to happen to Hugo. I had not defined my feeling, and it had in an odd way become less, since Paulina came to tea, and I had seen her myself. What George said comforted me much more. It was like waking up from bad dreams. I felt suddenly very fond of George, fonder than usual.

After tea, when the Connells had gone, I walked back with George and Mollie to their flat.

‘I am rather sorry for that girl,’ said Mollie.

‘Yes, the mother is a terror,’ agreed George, answering, as he often did, what Mollie had felt and not said.

‘Is Hugo as bewitched as ever, do you think?’ Mollie asked, and George shrugged his shoulders and looked at me.

‘Helen and I have decided not to worry yet,’ he said.

She gave Hugo a big photograph of herself, with the white furs close up round her face, and a big hat pulled low over her eyes. There was a scrawling signature across it. Hugo kept it in his bedroom on his dressing-table. Guy told Mollie about it, and said:

‘I don’t like it, Mollie. If he had stuck it in his sitting-room I wouldn’t have minded it so much.’

And Mollie said:

‘But Hugo wouldn’t put even his wife out in public—his wife’s photograph, I mean.’

And I remembered how he wouldn’t have Cousin Delia’s photograph out in his study at school. He took it with him every term, and kept it in a box, ‘because it was precious.’

And I thought:

‘Well, he doesn’t put Paulina in a box; that is something.’

He wrote a lot of poetry at this time, and did not show it all to me as he used to. George saw it and said it was good.

We went to the Commemoration Ball that year, and Hugo asked us to bring Paulina.

Cousin Delia came, and we stayed at an hotel. Guy came up too, and Anthony Cowper.

Hugo danced with Paulina a great deal. He danced with me too, of course, but it was not like it used to be. Paulina looked very lovely. She wore a pale blue gown with sequins embroidered on it, that shimmered and rippled when she moved, and her hair shone like corn in the sun.

I sat with Cousin Delia for a bit and watched them dancing, and I wondered what she was thinking.

I wanted to say:

‘Paulina is very pretty, don’t you think?’ and see what she would say. But I couldn’t. Cousin Delia would always know what you were really meaning if you tried to say something else.

Once she touched my hand.

‘I like that dress of yours, dear heart,’ she said. ‘Did Mollie help you to choose it?’

Cousin Delia was very fond of Mollie, and Mollie loved her. We were all glad about that.

Guy and Mollie came up to us. I thought how pretty Mollie looked that night, more as she ought to look always, and I thought I would rather look like Mollie than Paulina, in spite of everything.

Hugo brought Paulina to Campden Hill that summer. Grandmother did not like her.

‘No, my dear Hugo,’ she said afterwards. ‘Not a suitable young woman, in my opinion. Unintelligent and pretentious. I advise you to leave her alone.’

Hugo blushed and smiled.

‘I am sorry, Aunt Gerry,’ he said. ‘I am sorry you don’t like her.’

‘It may have been a mistake to say what I did,’ she said afterwards to me, ‘but I don’t think so. _Épris_, I think—distinctly _épris_—but not _inamorato_.’

VII

Hugo went abroad that summer with Guy and George. Anthony Cowper joined them in the Tyrol, and they walked down into Italy. They visited Verona and Bologna, and then the Umbrian towns. Hugo became interested in the early Umbrian painters. He came back very full of them. He had a copy of one, a very primitive Byzantine-looking Madonna, pale gold and white and grey, which he hung up in his room. That was the first break in his regime of no pictures at all.

We were all at Yearsly at the end of September. Mollie and I had been in Ireland. We went by ourselves to the West Coast, and bathed and walked, and came back to Yearsly in September.

Guy had to go back to London to his law work soon after, and Hugo went with him for a bit. He saw Paulina in London. Mollie and I knew that; so did Cousin Delia. I wished sometimes I could have talked to him about Paulina quite naturally, as we should have talked once, but things had got different with him and me. We were not close and harmonious as we used to be, and it was that that I minded more than anything else.

VIII

That was Hugo’s last year at Oxford. He belonged to Literary Societies and read essays to them. He enjoyed himself very much, I think. He seemed so full of interest in so many things that I wondered at him sometimes—and wondered what he would do in the end.

His enthusiasm for Paulina died down again. Exactly when it died, or why, I do not know, but I felt it go, and so did the others.

It was Guy who first spoke of it, when we were at Yearsly that Christmas. We were sitting in the old schoolroom, round the fire. He was sucking at his pipe, and he took it out to fill.

‘Hugo has recovered,’ he said. ‘The Paulina episode has passed.’ George grunted.

‘Time too,’ he said, and it almost sounded to me as though he were annoyed with Hugo. ‘Hugo takes a long time to grow up,’ he said. Guy laughed.

‘You talk as though you were fifty, George,’ he said.

‘I am fifty,’ George answered, ‘compared to Hugo. That is partly,’ he added blandly, ‘why I am less charming.’

‘Only partly,’ rejoined Guy, stuffing down his pipe.

Guy and George always smoked pipes. Hugo did not. He started at one time, but gave it up.

‘He’ll smoke a pipe when he’s grown up,’ said George.

‘We shall be dead when he’s grown up,’ said Guy.

‘I think Hugo is just as grown up as any of you,’ said Mollie. ‘I don’t think he will ever be different.’

‘Should we like it if he was different?’ I said.

George looked slowly round at me.

‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘I think Helen is right. We grumble at Hugo sometimes, but we shouldn’t like him different,’

IX

Hugo and George went in for their examinations. George got a first and Hugo a second.

Walter was in for the same examination; I remember seeing his name in the list.

After that they were in London for the Civil Service Examination.

George did well in that too, but Hugo did not. His name was a long way down in the list, and they said he might not get a post at all. Cousin John was worried about it.

‘I don’t want him to get into some side show,’ he said. ‘He had better give it up and try for something else.’

But Hugo said he would like to wait and see. He furnished the two rooms that Guy had kept for him.

He had his Delphic Charioteer, and his Umbrian Madonna, and the blue curtains and the grey chairs. It was very like his room in Oxford had been. That autumn was a happier time. We were all together again.

George got a post in the Treasury before Christmas, and he set up house with Mollie in Cheyne Walk. They had the two top floors of a house, far along where the river is wide, near the four chimneys. Mollie worked in her laboratory in the mornings, and sometimes after lunch as well. She was writing a thesis on enzymes. It seemed funny always to me that Mollie should do that sort of thing, but she liked it, and it never seemed to use up her soul as I have seen it do since, with other people.

Mollie cared really far more about George and about Guy than she did for all her science, and about me and Hugo too, and she did not pretend not to.

‘I do the biology too,’ she said, ‘because it interests me and I have plenty of time. If I had not plenty of time I should not do it.’

‘The perfect dilettante,’ Walter called her, when I told him that. ‘How much value will her biology be, treated like that?’

And I said:

‘I don’t know about the biology, but she is of value. She is one of the most perfectly balanced people I know.’

And Walter did not deny it, for he liked Mollie.

X

Hugo joined a society of New Poets. They used to meet and read poetry aloud in a room behind Leicester Square. Hugo was interested in metres. He used to spend days in the British Museum reading old Renaissance poets who did tricks with metres, and he started to translate the Greek Anthology. Some of his verses, were, I think, very beautiful, and George thought so too. But he wanted to do more than that. He had not found He had not yet what he wanted to do.

In February he had an offer of work in the Inland Revenue. He refused it, and gave up the idea of the Civil Service. He thought again at this time of a post in a museum, and began to qualify for that.

I was learning dancing now, with a Russian lady called Ivanovna, who had been in the Russian ballet. I loved those lessons, and they filled in the time when Mollie was at work. I should like to have done some definite work too, but I did not know what to do, and I was happy just waiting and being alive.

That spring and summer we were very gay, and our party had grown larger now, for Anthony Cowper had work in London too, at the Chancery Bar, and Ralph Freeman was in the Foreign Office, and we all enjoyed ourselves. We danced a great deal. We all liked dancing.

And Ralph Freeman had a sister Daphne who used to come too, when we liked; and we went to theatres, almost always in the pit, and to races in Anthony Cowper’s car. Sometimes I rode with Guy in the Park before breakfast, and sometimes we went down to Richmond and had supper on the river in punts.

Often we went to Yearsly for the week-end, and Yearsly was always the same, and Cousin Delia always the same.

I think of that summer often when I am in London in June; the scent of limes and chestnut trees, and dust, and the fresh green of the trees, and the watering carts in the streets, and people coming out of houses in new clothes, pretty summer clothes, light-hearted people as we were then. Hugo had a lavender-coloured tie that summer, and George used to chaff him about it; and Guy had a light grey suit; George said it was too light a grey. Walter used to say that they must have spent a great deal of money on clothes, but I don’t think they did. Their clothes amused them, among other things. So did my clothes and Mollie’s, and we saw no harm in that. I see no harm even now.

It was like the old days at Yearsly in one way. We lived in the present. We did not look ahead much or wonder what was going to happen. The days passed so quickly, one behind the other. It was the long hot summer of 1911. Life was very full and very sweet.

XI

And then Sophia Lane Watson came back. It seems odd now to think of that time without her, and then her coming back. She had mattered so much to me before, and now again in a different way, and in between she had not mattered at all.

It began in that Poetry Shop near Leicester Square. I was there with Hugo, looking at books, and I found a book on the shelf of new publications. _Verses_, by Sophia Watson. I was looking at the verses without thinking of her, for Sophia Watson seemed different somehow from Lane Watson, and then as I read the verses they reminded me of her. They reminded me of the poetry she used to write at school, and I suddenly wondered if it could be the same. I showed the book to Hugo, and he started to read it, and then he went on and on.

There was a great shaft of sunlight with dust in it—motes of dust floating in it; it shone through the little window high up at the back of the shop and across the foreign books in paper covers that were there, and on to Hugo, and I watched him as he read and felt pleased I had shown him the book, for he always found the new books as a rule.

‘By Jove,’ he said at length. ‘This is jolly stuff. Do you say you know the woman? Sophia Watson? I don’t remember her.’

‘She was at Ellsfield—at school you know. Don’t you remember, she came to Yearsly once? She was a great friend of mine then—at least I think this must be the same.’ Hugo puckered his brows.

‘Oh, a little dark thing. I believe I remember her. Was that her name?’

‘I wonder where she is now,’ I said. ‘I think I shall write to her again.’ I felt suddenly that I should like to see her.

Hugo bought the book, and I wrote to her and addressed the letter care of her publishers.

It was over a week before I had an answer. Then it was an answer very like her.

‘DEAR HELEN,—

‘Thank you for your letter. It was kind of you to write. I am glad you liked my poems. I don’t know if they are good. I am living in London now and this is my address.

‘Yours sincerely,

‘SOPHIA WATSON.’

It was like a child’s letter, so stiff and abrupt, and it made me laugh. I invited her to tea at Campden Hill, and Hugo and Mollie to meet her.

She was very like what she had been as a child, but I think less striking. Her hair was up, of course, and did not look so much and so black, and it mattered more now she was grown up that she was so badly dressed.

She was wearing a cotton dress that afternoon—a lilac check that might have been quite nice, but it was all washed out and hung down behind in a tail, as her skirts used to do at school, and she had a green straw hat that did not go with it at all, and grey stockings and brown shoes.

She was very stiff and polite when she came in. Grandmother spoke to her first; she remembered her coming to lunch when we were little, and she had known her father long ago, she said. She smiled at me, but gravely, in a distant sort of way.

She said:

‘It is a long time since we have met, but I should have known you again.’

‘And I you,’ I said. ‘I am sure I should.’

Grandmother laughed at us.

‘What, six years, is it, or five? I should hope you would remember.’

I laughed too. I said:

‘Six years is a great deal at our time of life.’

Sophia smiled. ‘It seems a very long time,’ she said.

Hugo was watching her, but he did not say much. He never spoke to people about their poetry or pictures or things they did, unless he knew them well.

It was impertinent, he used to say—like talking about their feelings for their husbands or wives.

George said that was a mistake—that out of every ten authors nine at least liked to talk about their own works.

I never wrote myself, or painted, and I don’t know which is true in general, but I am sure that with Sophia, Hugo was quite right.

She seemed to unfreeze after a bit, when she saw we were not going to talk about her book.

She was living by herself, she said, in rooms near Sloane Square.

‘Not far from us,’ said Mollie. ‘You must come and see us. Do come and see us.’

Sophia said she would like to come, and Mollie gave her their address.

‘Come to supper on Thursday,’ she said. ‘Can you? Just my brother and me.’

And Sophia said she would.

‘A funny, quiet, little person,’ said Grandmother when she had gone. ‘Not at all like her father, as I remember him.’

‘Oh, not quiet—wild,’ said Hugo. ‘Like a wild animal in a cage.’

‘I think she was very shy,’ said Mollie, ‘but I liked her.’

‘She was wild when she was at school,’ I said. ‘Wild underneath, I mean’; and I wondered how Hugo had seen so much in so short a time. But that was like Hugo.

XII

After that we saw a good deal of Sophia. She liked Mollie, and Mollie liked her. It surprised me rather, but I was glad. They were so unlike each other that they did not clash, and Mollie looked after Sophia, and treated her rather as a child. She was living in rooms alone, in a street off the King’s Road. We thought she had run away from home, but she never told us so.

She did not speak about her home to Mollie or me.

I believe she did to Hugo.

She was writing a play, but she did not speak about that either. But she talked a lot when she got more used to us very much as she used to talk at school, about impersonal things. I felt her inhuman, and too odd; it had not mattered so much when she was a child; but she was attractive still, in her own queer way. You couldn’t help wondering what she was thinking about, and wanting to know. George and Hugo liked talking to her, but not Guy.

He said:

‘She is too clever for me, I can’t live up to it.’

But Guy said that very easily—it was almost a pose in Guy.

Hugo understood her from the first. It was extraordinary how his mind seemed to interpret hers. I don’t know how else to describe it. But it was very often like that, as though she were speaking a foreign language and only Hugo understood. You would not have expected that at first, for they were so different, Hugo so gracious and lovable and gentle, and Sophia so fierce and buttoned up. And Hugo was not tolerant and easy-going like Mollie; he was easily jarred upon and irritated if people and things were ‘Wrong’—but Sophia never jarred upon him, even when she seemed rude and ungracious, and she had a curious influence upon him, in his most special things.

He began to read Russian novels, which he had not liked before, and he went with her to odd meetings of Russian Anarchists, ‘Friends of Freedom’ they were called. She tried at one time to persuade him to go to Russia and help the Revolution. Guy was worried about it, and so was I; we thought Hugo might really go; but George said no, he wouldn’t, and George, of course, was right.

It sometimes surprises me to think how often George was right; instinctively, too, we asked for George’s opinion, and were satisfied by it to a great extent; funny George, with his wide, humorous mouth; dear George, with his steady eyes. I don’t know which side of him was best.

XIII

I don’t believe now that Hugo was in love with Sophia. His relation to her was an intellectual one. He was fond of her, and very intimate with her in a certain way, and she did have a great influence in his life, yet in one way he was more like an elder brother. We all treated him rather as though he were a dear, precious child, even I, who was younger than him, felt always as though I must protect him and defend him from something. He protected her, and although he read the books she recommended and went to the meetings she liked, she seemed to look up to him and depend on him in a different way from us.

I did not see all this at the time. I see it more clearly now; I am less prejudiced, and less entangled, and much less afraid.

It is fear, I think, that spoils everything. If one was never afraid one would make no mistakes. George said that once, and I think again that George was right.

I tried very hard to be fair to Sophia, to look at her impartially and judge her suitable or not. I felt sure that Hugo would marry her, and I wanted to be glad, but I could not. I don’t suppose I could have been satisfied with any one for him; I loved him too much. If it had been Mollie I should have felt different about it. But Mollie was for Guy—that was settled.

Sophia was not beautiful enough for Hugo, nor comfortable enough. I could not imagine her in a home of her own, and Hugo coming back to her in the evening and being happy. He would not want always to read Turgueniev, and books about people who were hanged. There was a book called _The Seven that Were Hanged_: Sophia gave it to me for my birthday, and I hated it. She understood one side of Hugo, better perhaps than I did, but there was another side, the more personal side, that she would never understand.

And then I would be angry with myself and miserable.

I went for long walks by myself at this time. It was the autumn now. We had been at Yearsly and come back. Sophia had come too for a week. She had fitted in better than I expected, and I thought that Cousin Delia liked her.

Now it was October.

‘Very soon, now, they will be engaged,’ I thought, and wished almost that it would be soon.

I went for a walk in Kensington Gardens and tried to think it out. The gardeners were sweeping up the leaves—yellow leaves of lime trees and planes.

‘It is my own fault,’ I kept saying to myself. ‘I have spoilt it all myself.’

My relation to Hugo had been perfect once—a beautiful, almost a holy thing. He had been my brother and something more, for there was a freedom, an element of choice, which would not have been there if we were really brother and sister; and now it was as though I had made claims upon him that I had hardly realized myself. I felt hurt by him and injured, though he had done me no injury. ‘It is not his fault,’ I thought, ‘that he wants other people besides me, and I want only him. That is quite natural. It is only my feeling like this that is wrong’; and I felt ashamed and unhappy.

XIV

Hugo asked me to be kind to Sophia. It had not occurred to me that I was not.

He said:

‘She likes you so much, and you used to like her.’

He had come to dinner at Campden Hill. I could see that he was excited and happy, he talked so much at dinner, and his eyes shone. Grandmother noticed it too, for I saw her watching him, and she asked him, when the coffee came, what he had been doing that day.

He said:

‘I went for a walk with Sophia Watson in Richmond Park.’

Grandmother said:

‘Her father’s name was _Lane_ Watson.’

‘Yes, I know, but she thinks that sounds pretentious. She says their name was really only Watson to begin with. She hates fuss.’

‘It is generally simpler to have the same name as one’s parents until one is married,’

‘I don’t think Sophia’s parents can be very nice people. They have not been kind to her.’

‘Ah,’ said Grandmother slowly. ‘That is a different matter.’

‘The trees were beautiful in Richmond Park, so bright and red and gold. I suppose they have more colour when the summer has been hot. The leaves were coming down all round us, like rain, in the wind. It was very windy.’

Grandmother said:

‘Oh.’

She looked at Hugo over her spectacles, and Hugo flushed.

‘I wish you could have been there,’ he said rather lamely. ‘It was awfully nice.’

Grandmother laughed; she said:

‘You had better bring the young woman to see me, Hugo, I liked her much better than the other one—Miss . . . Connell, wasn’t it, with the fair hair, but—take your time.’

Hugo murmured something inarticulate; he was peeling a pear and I could not see his face, but I knew he was saying it wasn’t like that at all.

Coffee came in, and after the coffee grandmother went upstairs. She had not looked at me at all, and I was glad.

We went into the drawing-room, Hugo and I, and sat down by the fire. At least I sat down and Hugo stood up with his back to the fire. He took a cigarette from the jade box on the chimney-piece, and then he began to talk. The room was rather dark, for Grandmother would not have electric light, and there was only one lamp on the table behind.

He said:

‘Aunt Gerry is a dear, I am awfully fond of her. But she does get the wrong end of the stick sometimes. I suppose in her generation it would have been like that.’

I said:

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

Hugo looked down at me and then away.

‘It isn’t a question of “taking time” at all, and of course Sophia is quite different from Paulina. One couldn’t think of them in the same sort of way at all.’

I said:

‘No, they aren’t at all alike.’

My cigarette had gone out. I asked Hugo for the matches. He gave them to me and went on:

He said:

‘I liked just looking at Paulina. Didn’t you? She was beautiful to look at, and she did speak her lines awfully well too, but of course—well, she hadn’t got a _mind_ like Sophia. Sophia is so frightfully interesting. It is like exploring in an unknown sea. . . .’ He laughed, a little apologetically. ‘You never know what Sophia will think or feel about a thing, but it is always real, what she thinks or feels.’

I said:

‘Yes, I think it is,’ and he looked pleased, ‘Of course you were interested in her at school,’ he said. ‘I remember that—you used to talk to me about her a lot, and I think you really described her rather well. But I don’t know how it was—she didn’t interest me a bit that first time I saw her, when you brought her to Yearsly.’

I said:

‘No, I was disappointed then that neither you nor Guy seemed to care for her much.’

‘Guy doesn’t appreciate her now, and I can understand that. She is not at her best with him. She is shy, and he doesn’t get any further.’

I said nothing, and he went on.

‘I don’t think people realize how shy she is. They think she is disagreeable and ungracious sometimes, and they don’t understand that she is just frightened of them. Do you know, Helen,’ he looked straight at me, and gave a little laugh, ‘she is even afraid of you! She admires you awfully, and would like you to like her, but she thinks you don’t. I told her, of course, that that was nonsense—that I was sure you liked her, and I told her that you used to talk a lot about her when you were at school.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Oh, she said that that was quite different. “People change and outgrow each other,” she said, and then she said that even then she had cared for you much more than you cared for her. She thinks you find her dull and dowdy. You do like her, don’t you, Helen?’

He asked it almost wistfully, and suddenly I wanted to cry. If I could have spoken quite frankly about Sophia, as though she did not affect me personally at all, it would have been all different; if I could have asked him straight out what he felt about her; if we could have talked to each other simply and without reserves, as we used to once, I think our lives might have been very different afterwards; but we couldn’t. He was trying to, I think, but I couldn’t respond. I was fighting against something in myself, and it was almost as though I was fighting against him. I did not want him to know my thoughts and my feelings as he used to know them; and I could not talk to him about Sophia.

I said:

‘Yes, I do like her, quite, but we haven’t an awful lot in common. I don’t think I am intellectual enough for her.’

Hugo ignored that. He said:

‘I should like you to be kind to her, Mollie is awfully kind to her, and she is very grateful to Mollie, but’—and he paused a moment—‘Mollie isn’t you.’

‘I don’t see what I can do for her that you and Mollie can’t do much better. What do you want me to do?’ Hugo fidgeted with the jade box on the chimney-piece.

‘Oh, I don’t know exactly—anything just to show her you like her. She minds about her clothes. Couldn’t you advise her about her clothes? She admires yours so much.’

And then I was angry. I wanted to say, ‘I am damned if I will.’ But I only did say, ‘I tried once to teach her to dance. It was no good.’ That was all I said, but Hugo knew I was angry. I could see that from the way he looked at me, and when he looked at me like that it was harder still not to cry. He looked hurt and puzzled, like a child who is spoken to crossly and doesn’t know what it has done wrong.

I was ashamed of myself again, and very unhappy.

XV

One day I was with Mollie in her flat, and we were dressing to go out. We were in her bedroom brushing our hair, and I remembered that dance at Yearsly on Guy’s twenty-first birthday, and old Nunky brushing my hair. I had been so pleased with my hair that night, and so had she, and now suddenly I hated it.

I said:

‘I do wish my hair was different, I am so tired of it like this,’

Mollie said:

‘Your hair is lovely, Helen. I always envy you the way it curls.’

I said:

‘It is so dull, just brown and ordinary. I wish it was bright yellow, or black and straight.’

Mollie looked round at me; she was brushing her own hair.

‘You poor pretty thing,’ she said, and threw her arms round my neck. ‘Oh, Helen, I’m so sorry for you, but don’t mind—it will be all right.’

Then I began to cry, and she comforted me. We never said what was the matter, but of course we both knew.

XVI

It was about a fortnight later that I went to Hugo’s room in Clifford’s Inn and found him out.

We were going to Richmond that afternoon, the Addingtons and Hugo and I, for a walk. I was to pick up Hugo first, and then we were to go on to the Addingtons in Chelsea.

When I got there, Hugo was out. Guy opened the door, and I thought he looked sorry.

He said:

‘He went off with Sophia to a Strindberg play. Did he know you were going to come?’

I said:

‘Yes, he knew—but I suppose he forgot. It doesn’t matter.’

We both stood still for a minute. I wanted to say something else, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Guy said:

‘Come along in.’

And I said:

‘No, I can’t. George and Mollie will be waiting.’

I wanted to say: ‘Don’t tell Hugo I came,’ but I couldn’t say it.

Guy said:

‘I’ll tell Hugo you came, I’ll blow him up.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t bother. It’s all right.’

Guy said:

‘I wish I could come, but I’ve got to finish this stuff.’

He nodded his head towards his room and the table spread with papers. It was a joke with us now that Guy was working hard.

I said:

‘I wish you could. Come next Saturday.’

He said:

‘Yes, next Saturday I can. But we’ll meet before that.’

‘Oh yes, lots of times. Good-bye.’

I turned down the stairs. I was glad to get away. It hurt me that Hugo should have gone out and forgotten—it had never happened before.

When I got to the Addingtons’ flat, Mollie was upstairs.

George was reading by the fire, with his back to the door.

He looked round and took his pipe out of his mouth.

‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Where’s Hugo?’

‘Hugo had gone out to a play with Sophia.’

I pulled off my gloves and sat down in the other chair.

‘Strindberg,’ I said. ‘I don’t like Strindberg.’

George bent forward, and tapped his pipe out on the hob.

‘Nor do I,’ he said.

I had chilblains on my fingers. It was cold that afternoon, and raw, and they tingled and hurt. It was partly the chilblains that made me feel so wretched. I stretched my hands out to the fire.

George filled his pipe slowly, and lit it. The flame flickered up and down against his face as he drew it in. He grunted and threw the match away.

He said:

‘Hugo is a fool.’

I said:

‘I don’t know. He has a right to like it if he likes.’

George puffed away in silence for a time.

There was some of Mollie’s restfulness about George. It was good to have him in the room when one was troubled.

‘I am losing patience with Hugo,’ he said at last. ‘It is time he grew up.’

I wanted to defend Hugo even from him. It was not Strindberg we were talking about. We both knew that.

I said:

‘I think it is a mistake to say that. One can’t choose for other people. Hugo knows what he wants.’

‘No,’ said George shortly. ‘He doesn’t. That’s the trouble.’

He glanced up at me, and away again into the fire.

‘We must be patient with Hugo,’ he said in a different tone. ‘He takes a long time to understand things sometimes, but he does understand in the end.’

‘I think perhaps he understands too much,’ I said, and wished I had not said it.

XVII

And then, that Christmas, I met Walter again.

We were on a walking tour along the Roman Wall, Guy and Hugo and the Addingtons and Sophia and I. We had begun at Hexham, and we walked along the wall towards Carlisle. It was on the fourth day that we met Walter, in the camp at Howstead.

It was a windy day, very cold and clear and bright, and we reached the camp about the middle of the day. We had sandwiches with us, and we sat down to eat them at the Northern Gate, looking out over the waste space of fell towards Scotland.

Suddenly I saw Walter. He had come up from behind somewhere, and was standing beside me.

‘Hullo,’ said George. ‘Where have you come from, Sebright?’

He said:

‘How do you do, Miss Woodruffe?’

I felt, that time, that he was looking at me, and that he was glad to see me.

He said:

‘I have waited three years for this.’

Mollie said:

‘It’s a wonderful place.’

He meant that he had waited to see me. He told me afterwards that he had meant it, and I knew before he told me. I knew, I think, when he said it, up there on the hill, and the odd thing is that I wasn’t surprised.

He sat down beside me on the stones of the Northern Gate.

He said:

‘The barbarians were down there. It looks like it, doesn’t it? And there were Southern soldiers up here. They must have hated it.’

He took us round the camp afterwards and explained to us what the places were—where they washed their clothes and where they cooked. It seemed to me very interesting, what he told us, and there were inscriptions on some of the stones that he showed us too.

‘Sebright is a dab at inscriptions,’ George said to Hugo.

‘He got some honour in Berlin for a thing on inscriptions.’

I thought that he made it very vivid, the life in that Roman camp, and I had never felt much interest in Rome before. Sophia was interested too, and George—but not Hugo. Hugo used to say sometimes that he had a blind spot in his mind for history; but I was vexed with him this time for not being interested. He was polite, of course—he was always polite; but I, who knew him well, could see that he was bored.

Sophia began talking to Walter; she did not seem shy of him at all.

‘They must have been hard, enduring sort of people, she said. Up here at the end of the world—it is like the end of the world,’ she went on half to herself, ‘looking out on to that . . . I like the Romans.’

Walter looked pleased—but he was talking to me, and I knew it and was glad.

I don’t know even now how much the difference was in him and how much in me. He seemed to me very different this time, from that afternoon at Oxford three years before. He seemed to me now to have more life and more assurance, as though he felt himself here on his own ground. But perhaps I was more ready to notice him now. There had been no room for him at all in my mind before.

When we had finished looking at the camp Guy said we must go on. We were to sleep at Gilsland that night if we could, and the evenings were short.

Walter had come that way the day before, and slept at a farm near by, but he said now that he would walk back with us. He did not say ‘if you don’t mind’ or ‘may I?’ as one somehow expected him to say. He just said:

‘I will go with you. I know this wall pretty well.’

We walked along the top of the wall for a long way, up hills and down, always at the edge of the cliff, with the barbarian country below. Then the others said they would take the lower track, farther down across the fell, but I wouldn’t. I kept along the top of the wall, and Walter came with me.

Once Hugo called me.

‘It is much easier along here,’ he said. ‘You had much better come down.’

And I said:

‘I won’t come down. I am going into the barbarian country.’

And I laughed at him, and then I jumped down on the other side of the wall and ran down along the slope of the hill. It was not so steep in this place—towards a little lake with trees beside it, down in the flat wild country.

‘Do you want to see the barbarians?’ Walter asked, and I said:

‘Yes, but they are all gone.’

Walter said:

‘They are not gone, only civilized. Do you ever wish you could get away from civilized people, and culture and books and all that sort of thing?’

And I said:

‘No, I have never wished that. I have never thought about it.’

He said:

‘Perhaps you haven’t been oppressed by it, as I have. Routines and curricula and examinations—always doing what you have got to do and never what you want.’

I said:

‘No, I generally do what I want—or at any rate I _don’t_ do what I _don’t_ want.’ And I thought of Cousin Delia and Yearsly, and how seldom the question had arisen.

Walter said:

‘That is better. That is much better. That is partly what I felt about you!’

He said it with a sudden vehemence and then stopped short. I looked at him and he was looking at me. I felt suddenly uneasy, and an odd ridiculous feeling came over me that I was really outside a safe wall, in a strange country, and I wanted to go back.

I said:

‘We will go back now, or we shall be lost. It will be too steep further on.’

Walter said:

‘It is too steep now. We must go on now we are here.’

And I felt as though we were walking in a dream, as though everything that he said and that I said were symbolic and fraught with a deeper meaning than we knew. It was an odd exciting feeling and made me a little bit afraid.

We found a track along the fell, and walked on it, and Walter began to talk about his work on the Roman inscriptions in Britain. He told me too that he had been appointed to a lectureship in Archæology in London University.

‘I shall be coming to live in London after Easter,’ he said, and then, ‘I hope I shall see you there.’

I said:

‘Yes, surely. We are all in London now.’

He said:

‘I know.’

We came at last to a place where the wall was lower and broken down, and we climbed back and over it into the Roman country. The others were waiting for us—sitting on big stones.

We stopped at Greenhead for the night, for it was getting dark already.

Walter stopped with us and went back the next day.

XVIII

Walter came to see me at Campden Hill Square.

Grandmother was in the drawing-room when he came in.

When I came downstairs I found them having tea.

Grandmother said:

‘Here is Mr. Sebright, my dear. He has been telling me about his studies in Roman Britain.’

It was like my grandmother not to be surprised. She had never heard of Walter, I am sure, for we had none of us thought or spoken of him before, and since that walk at Christmas, I had thought of him a good deal, and not wanted to speak.

Grandmother liked ‘antiquities.’ When she was a girl she had visited a great many museums; with her father first, who thought it was good for her, and then with her husband, who liked museums himself.

She used to say that it was a sign of our generation not to like museums, and a bad sign. Some things about us she considered good. I could see that she was pleased with Walter.

‘Mr. Sebright tells me that the inscribed rocks at Chester are not really so interesting as those at Corbridge,’ she said.

Walter was standing up to shake hands with me.

I knew again that he had been waiting for me, and wanting to see me very much.

Grandmother went on talking to him about the inscriptions at Corbridge.

It did not interest me at all what they were saying, but I felt excited at Walter’s being there. It was now that I noticed his hands, what beautiful hands they were, as he handed me my tea and bread and butter, and I watched his face as he was talking to Grandmother. He did not seem to me absurd now, as he had at first.

Afterwards he was talking about something in the British Museum—bas-reliefs, I think, with some inscriptions on them—and I said I didn’t know the British Museum. I had only been there once, with Hugo, to look at Greek vases, and he said:

‘Oh, but the Greek vases are very dull. It is the early things you should see—little pieces of things that mean nothing by themselves, but when you piece them together tell you about whole nations you didn’t know. You ought to see the Mycenaean fragments and the Hittite things. Won’t you come one day and let me show them to you?’

I said I should love to see them; and even while I was saying so I wondered why I said it, for I did not care for fragments of things at all, and I did not like the Museum the one time I was there.

‘Will you come next Thursday?’ Walter asked. ‘I shall be there all day Thursday. If you could come in the afternoon—any time in the afternoon—I shall be there. I could show you lots of things, and then,’ he added, more shyly, ‘we could have tea.’

Grandmother laughed. She said:

‘If you make an archæologist of Helen I will take off my hat to you.’

I said:

‘I will come at half-past three.’

I did not mind Grandmother’s laughing. She did not laugh in a way one would mind.

When Walter had gone away I wondered if I had been silly. Why had I said I would go and look at inscriptions? I felt uncomfortable about it, and not at ease with myself.

XIX

I went to the British Museum on Thursday. Walter was waiting for me on the steps, and there was another man with him. The other man was called Furze. He was a professor at some University in Wales. He was older than Walter, but not very much older. He had a very kind face, and a funny way of ducking down his head. I liked him and was glad he was there too. He had been working with Walter all the morning in the Assyrian Room, it seemed, and now he came round with us for a bit, till it was time for him to catch his train.

He did not talk much; Walter did the talking. I thought he knew quite as much about the things as Walter, but he was not so excited about them.

We looked at some Assyrian bas-reliefs of people hunting lions. They were more interesting than I had expected, and rather beautiful too, some of them—rather beautiful clean lines—but Walter said even these were too late, and we went on to cases of rougher broken things, and he explained what they once had been—pots and ovens and tiles and all sorts of household stuff.

‘You will get back to your “Urdummheit,”’ Mr. Furze said, smiling at Walter, ‘_I_ think these pots were not very well made.’

Walter tossed his head. He seemed self-confident here, as he had been at Howsteads; not a bit shy or nervous, as he was at Oxford.

‘Who cares if they were well made? This is not an Arts and Crafts Exhibition. Of course Praxiteles made pretty ornaments, if you want that.’

‘Well, I still maintain that if you make a pot at all, it is better to make a beautiful pot than a misshapen one.’

It was evidently an old argument. I could see that.

I agreed with Mr. Furze.

‘I do get so sick of beauty,’ Walter said. ‘Beauty is quite beside the point.’

And then he laughed, for he saw Mr. Furze was laughing.

‘What do you think, Miss Woodruffe?’ he asked.

And I said:

‘Oh, I am afraid I like beautiful pots best, if there have got to be pots at all.’

He looked at me oddly, with a troubled, perplexed expression.

‘I expect you think me a Philistine,’ he said. ‘I am too, I suppose. All these shapes and designs and proportions that people keep talking about—they just mean nothing to me. They seem to me so _dull_—like rows of pretty faces with no souls.’

‘When old age shall this generation waste Thou shalt remain in midst of other woe,’

I said, and Walter wrinkled his forehead.

‘What is that?’ he asked. ‘I ought to know it, I expect, but I don’t. Poetry is another of the fringes for me. I’ve never had time for it.’

I was sorry I had used the quotation, for he looked vexed, and I had not meant to vex him.

I said:

‘It’s the Ode to a Grecian Urn. That’s what made me think of it—talking about urns.’

Walter grunted, and I realized that he did not know the Grecian Urn, but I couldn’t say, ‘It’s by Keats.’

Mr. Furze interposed.

‘Sebright is quite incorrigible,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t like Grecian Urns, and he doesn’t like poetry. He will certainly not read a poem about a Grecian Urn.’

Walter shrugged his shoulders and gave a little laugh, and I felt it had not mattered after all.

Soon after that Mr. Furze had to catch his train. I was sorry when he went away.

There was a tensity in the air when we were alone, and I felt somehow as though I were there on false pretences. Walter took me to a big stone in a square frame.

‘This is the Rosetta Stone,’ he said. ‘I think this is one of the most exciting things here.’

And he told me that there were three different languages on it, and three different scripts, and that had been the key to discovering a whole new civilization. People had worked out another language—Ancient Egyptian, he said it was—letter by letter, sign by sign, through comparing one side of the stone with the other, for the same legend was written on all three.

I could see that that was rather an exciting thing to do.

‘You know,’ he said suddenly. ‘I saw this stone first when I was ten years old. I had read about it in a book called _The Wonders of Antiquity_, and I came to see it with my mother, and it seemed to me even then the best thing in the world to work out new languages from old inscriptions, and discover new worlds like that—much better than discovering new things in this world. I have wanted to do it ever since, and now, partly, I can work at that; but I have to do Roman inscriptions too, because that was for a thesis to start with, to get my D.Litt., and I have to for the History school also. So I have got launched into Roman Britain, but what I really want to get at is the proto-Hittite script from Zenjirli and Sakjegöze and those things—those undeciphered hieroglyphs, you know.’

I did not know what the proto-Hittite script was then; it seems curious now to think of a time when I had not heard of it, but I thought I understood what he meant about discovering new worlds that way.

I asked:

‘Do you feel you can find out quite a lot about the people who wrote those inscriptions? Do they get quite real to you in the end?’

He said:

‘No, not like that. I don’t want them real like that. It is more to me like fitting pieces into a puzzle—thousands of tiny pieces, and a very big puzzle—and if they do fit, if even quite a small piece of the puzzle gets done, you know it’s right. That is one of the satisfactory things, it can’t be just better or worse, it must be right or wrong. Do you see what I mean at all?’

His voice changed; he asked the last question almost shyly. I think he did not expect people quite to understand.

I thought I did, and it interested me. This was a new world to me too; a cold intellectual world that I did not know at all; and I was in a mood to explore.

Afterwards we went out to tea in an A.B.C. near the Museum. At tea he was different again, more like he had been on the picnic. He was shyer and spoke more jerkily, and I felt much more that he admired me. The A.B.C. was crowded and rather noisy, and the marble top of the table was smudged with coffee that had been spilt. It seemed to me very odd to be sitting there with Walter. I seemed to be looking on from a long way off, and wondering how I came to be there.

After tea we got on to a bus. I said I could go home alone, but Walter would come with me. We did not talk very much on the bus. It was beginning to rain, and we pulled up the mackintosh cover from the seat in front.

He said good-bye to me on the steps of Campden Hill Square, and I thanked him for ‘a very interesting afternoon.’

He waited on the step.

‘May I come again?’ he asked. ‘May I take you out again?’

He asked it in his funny, jerky way, as though it mattered to him very much. I could not answer him at once. I felt somehow, irrationally, that my answer was very important.

I said:

‘You know; I don’t agree with you at all about Beauty and Poetry—and—all that sort of thing. I think perhaps I let you think this afternoon that I did agree.’

It sounded foolish even as I said it, and it was not even what I wanted to say.

He said very quietly:

‘I know that. You are the other side of life—all that I have not got, and don’t understand. I know I am one-sided. I would like to be different if I could.’

My heart began to thump. I had not realized that he would talk like that, yet. I was not ready. I wanted to go inside and shut the door, but I couldn’t shut the door while he stood there. The rain was falling faster now, and as I moved my head a little stream of water ran off the brim of my hat, down my neck.

I said:

‘I suppose everybody would like to be different if they could. I should like to have black hair, quite black and straight’; and I tried to laugh. ‘But we can’t be different really, ever.’

He said:

‘Not completely different, of course; but we can alter. People do alter. They can develop new sides in themselves without losing what they have got.’

I said:

‘It is too wet to talk any more now. Good-bye.’

He said:

‘I may come again, mayn’t I?’

I said:

‘Of course, if you like.’ I tried to answer lightly, to make what we were saying seem of no consequence.

I fumbled with my latch-key at the door. At last it opened, and a shaft of light shot out on to the steps. He turned away then and went down the steps, slowly at first and then faster. He turned down the Square to the north, towards Holland Park Road, and I went into the house. The hall was light and warm, and I shut the front door behind me with relief. Upstairs in my bedroom there was a fire. I took off my shoes and stockings and my wet coat, and then I sat down on the hearth-rug and cried for Hugo. He had never seemed so far away before.

XX

I did not speak to Mollie about Walter at first, nor to Hugo. It was almost a week before I saw Hugo again and then we were all together, and Sophia was there too. We were going to a concert, a Mozart concert at the Queen’s Hall. We did not go to dances so often since Sophia came, because she couldn’t dance. I danced with George and Guy sometimes, Mollie and I, without Hugo; but of course that was not the same thing.

The concert was lovely. It made us all happy. I felt that I had been horrid to Sophia, and that I would be nicer.

We went back to Hugo’s rooms and had coffee. It looked very pleasant, Hugo’s room that night, with the fire flickering on the low ceiling and the blue curtains and the charioteer.

Hugo said:

‘That music does one good. People could not be bad-tempered or fussed or worried if they heard some Mozart played every day before they got up.’

Guy hummed an Aria from Don Giovanni, a bit we had heard.

‘That is about the most perfect thing of all,’ he said.

Mollie was pouring out the coffee; she always did that part.

‘I think sometimes,’ said Sophia, ‘that music is all wrong, and poetry too, and all that we call art. I wonder sometimes if it isn’t all a kind of dope that we make for ourselves because we can’t face life; and it seems all pointless then.’

I said:

‘How odd that you should say that. It is almost what Mr. Sebright said.’

‘Sebright?’ said George. ‘When did he talk about it?’

‘I went to the British Museum with him the other day.’ I tried to say it nonchalantly, but I felt self-conscious, and that vexed me, for why shouldn’t I go with him? ‘He says Greek vases are like faces without souls.’

‘So they are,’ said George.

Hugo said:

‘No, they are not at all like that. They are more like souls without faces—impersonal and rather cold. Why did you go there?’ he asked abruptly.

And I said:

‘Because he asked me to. It was very interesting there.’

‘I don’t suppose he would care for vases,’ said Hugo, ‘or statues. He would like just objects of interest. Did you like them?’

I felt then that I could not discuss Walter, nor repeat what he had said, even what he had said while Mr. Furze was there. I felt suddenly that they were all hostile, my own dear people, and that Walter had somehow put his trust in me.

I said:

‘I did when he explained them to me.’

Guy said:

‘I should not have expected him to explain very well.’

‘Who is Mr. Sebright?’ asked Sophia. ‘Was that the man we met at the Roman Camp?’

‘Yes,’ said Mollie. ‘He is an archæologist.’

‘Epigraphist,’ corrected George.

Sophia said:

‘I liked him. He was a wild man.’

Guy said:

‘Oh, not at all wild. Quite a model young man—no vices and a credit to his college.’

Sophia said:

‘I didn’t mean wild in that way. More fanatical—or ruthless—I meant—as though he would be burned alive for something quite foolish—or burn other people.’

Sophia understood him better than the others, I thought, and I liked Sophia for it.

‘We might see Sebright some time,’ said George. ‘He is here now, isn’t he, at the Grey College?’

XXI

After that the Addingtons invited Walter to their flat. He came several times, and generally I was there. Sometimes Guy or Hugo came too, and once Sophia. Ralph Freeman was abroad at the time in Vienna, and Anthony Cowper had also been abroad.

Mollie talked to Walter about his work at Grey College and his pupils and the courses they were taking. Mollie could talk to people about that sort of thing. She did not find it boring, if it made the conversation easier. That was partly why people liked Mollie.

But he did not talk to her as he had to me, about the proto-Hittite script, and the Rosetta Stone. That side of his work was nearer, I felt, to him than the classes and lectures, and it was somehow a sort of secret between him and me.

I used to watch Walter when he was talking to Mollie or to George, and I used to wish he looked different from what he did.

I could not bear the black steel spectacles he wore, and I wished he would not speak so jerkily, nor come into a room as though he were afraid.

He was worst, always, when Guy and Hugo were there. He seemed ludicrous then somehow, like a caricature of himself. He would say provocative things in a nervous voice, and I could see that he irritated Guy.

He came for me again at Campden Hill Square, as he had said he would. Once he took me to a lecture on excavations in Syria. It was a dull lecture, but it seemed somehow an adventure to be there with him. It was like walking on a volcano, for I did not know his mind. I did not know what he would think or say next, as I did with Guy and Hugo, and with George.

Another time we went for a walk by the Serpentine, and he told me how he used to go for walks there when he was a little boy, on Sundays with his mother. He had lived near Earl’s Court all his life. He still lived there, with his mother. His father had been a clergyman at some church round there, and had died when he was five. He had a half-sister much older than himself, who was headmistress at a school. He had been at St. Paul’s himself.

He was devoted to his mother.

‘She gave all her life to me when my father died,’ he said. ‘She was with me always and did whatever I did. I can’t think how children grow up with ordinary mothers, when I think what mine was to me.

‘We were poor, of course,’ he said. ‘We were always poor. But I am glad of that. It made us closer together. In a household with lots of servants, children cannot be close to their mothers, as I was to mine.’

I thought of Cousin Delia, and disagreed. But I did not interrupt him. Walter was never easy to interrupt.

‘I owe a great deal to my sister too,’ he said. ‘She helped with my education. My mother would not have known about that, but Maud saw that I was well prepared, and that I worked hard. I don’t think I was idle by nature, but I am grateful to Maud.’

He did not ask me about my childhood. He did not seem to like it when I spoke of Yearsly. He talked mostly about himself. He was ambitious, he told me that, and determined to do great things with his proto-Hittite script.

And all that attracted me in an odd, contrary way. It was so unlike Hugo—and I thought of Walter as strong because Hugo was weak, and determined because Hugo was undetermined. I was trying hard during these weeks to think less well of Hugo. It seems a long time now, that time with Walter before we were engaged. It seems strange now, in a way, that Hugo did nothing—but when I think of the dates I know it was not long at all. It was at the end of February that Walter came first to Campden Hill, and he asked me to marry him on the 10th of April.

We had met, I suppose, a dozen times, not more. We did not know each other at all.

He came to me in the drawing-room at Campden Hill Square. He had not said that he was coming, and I was not expecting him.

The room was full of tulips from Yearsly, for Cousin Delia sent them to us every week, and the parcel had just come. It was a warm sunny day, and the sun streamed in through the window at the end of the room. I was sitting on the window-seat, and the window was open. I had been putting the tulips in water. They were done now. I was gathering up the ends. There was string and brown paper, and a note from Cousin Delia as well, and the little stalks and ends of leaves from the tulips.

I was thinking of Yearsly, and Cousin Delia, and not of Walter at all. I was thinking that I would go down to Yearsly for a bit; that I would write to Cousin Delia that evening and tell her I was coming. I had not been there lately even for week-ends. I would go alone now, without Hugo or Guy, and be there with Cousin Delia.

And then the door opened and the parlourmaid came in and said:

‘Mr. Sebright to see you, Miss.’

It was a red-haired parlourmaid called Hannah. She had not been with us very long, and she married a policeman soon afterwards, soon after I was married.

Walter came in, and she shut the door. It took me a little time to collect my thoughts—they had been so far from him—and then I looked at him, and I knew why he had come.

He came into the middle of the room, and stood there. I asked him to sit down, but he didn’t listen.

He said:

‘I have come to ask you to marry me. I have meant to always, since the first day that I saw you—at Oxford, in those rooms in the Broad.

‘I don’t see the good of waiting any longer. You are different from me, I know that. You are beautiful and bright, like a flower, and I love you for that. I love you for being what you are. I am a dull fellow in many ways. I know that too. But I could be different with you.’ He said it in a jerky, monotonous voice, as though he had learnt it by heart—and he did not look at me while he said it.

His eyes were fixed on the floor, about a foot in front of me, and his hands were clasped behind him. My eyes followed his, instinctively, and I saw a leaf there—a little leaf that I had forgotten to pick up. I couldn’t pick it up now.

I had known this was coming sooner or later, but I was not ready. It was as though I was paralysed and struck dumb—I could not say anything at all.

And then he looked up suddenly and our eyes met. His were all alight—those pale blue eyes of his behind the steel spectacles. I had never seen them like this before, and his voice shook now when he spoke.

‘I don’t suppose it is any use,’ he said. ‘I never thought it was. But I had to tell you—it can’t hurt you to be told.’

I said:

‘I am sorry.’

He said:

‘Don’t be sorry. There is nothing to be sorry about. I am glad I met you. My life was very empty before I met you. It can never be so empty again.’

And I felt suddenly:

‘What is this I am doing? What am I pushing away?’ I felt that it was wonderful to be wanted like that—and that Hugo did not want me—and I said: ‘Forgive me. I will marry you if you want me.’

It was funny, I think, that I said, ‘Forgive me.’ I didn’t know then why I said it—I just heard myself saying it.

Walter came up to me and kissed me. He did it awkwardly—very stiffly, as if he did not know how—and I thought how Hugo did not kiss me on the night of Guy’s party, at Yearsly by the Jasmine Gate. And I knew as he was kissing me that I had made a mistake.

I felt very cold, and I shivered—perhaps because I had shivered with Hugo at the Jasmine Gate. But that had been different, quite.

Walter said:

‘Don’t be afraid, my precious. I will try to be what you want.’

And I thought:

‘Does he understand after all? How much does he understand?’

XXII

I went the next day to tell Mollie. It was a Saturday, I remember, and it had rained; all the streets were wet.

Walter had stayed with me all the evening before, and I asked him not to come the next day. I felt that I must have a day in peace, without him, or anyone.

I sat in my room all the morning, and tried to read. In the afternoon I went out and walked about.

The trees were all green now, but it was not warm. Clouds had come up in the night, and the sky was still grey.

I meant to go to Mollie in time for tea; I was on the Embankment by half-past four, but I did not go in; I went to a tea shop instead, a little restaurant, not far from Mollie’s flat, where we had had lunch together very often before. I sat a long time over my tea. I shrank somehow from seeing Mollie and George; he would be there too on a Saturday afternoon. They might be out of course, but I did not think so, for it had been arranged before, or half arranged, that I should go there this afternoon.

I went out again, on to the Embankment; I walked along by the river, westward, past the Addingtons’ windows, towards the power station. The sun was beginning to go down, and the sky was all pink now, behind the four chimneys; the broad stretch of river where it bends, beyond Battersea Bridge, was pink too; a mist was coming up, with the tide, I suppose, from the sea, and the colours were dimmed and obscured by the greyness of the mist. A man came along with a stick, and lit the lamps, one lamp, and then two, and then three; it was quite light still, and the lamps looked small and rather foolish; I wondered why they lit the lamps so soon.

There was an old man selling flowers by the corner of Battersea Bridge; I had never seen him there before; he looked a very poor old man; I bought a bunch of narcissi from him; it cost a shilling.

I thought:

‘That is expensive, for a bunch of narcissi.’

I thought:

‘It is no good; I must go in and tell them; it is too late to go back; I must tell them now what I have done.’

I knocked on the door, and rang the bell. The woman from below opened it; she often did, and I went up.

There was a knocker on the door of Mollie’s room; it was the first door one came to in their part of the house. I knocked on the door with the knocker and walked in.

They were sitting beside the fire, George in his arm-chair, and Mollie on a cushion on the floor. There was tea on the table, pushed back again against the wall; they had finished tea, and were reading; the grey cat was with them, on the hearth-rug.

It was comfortable, and familiar, and homely. There were blue curtains in this room too, but there were patterns on them, blue and white, and the cushions on the chairs were red; it was a homelier room than Hugo’s, and the chairs came mostly from their old home in Manchester, ordinary sort of chairs, not straight deep shapes like his. There was a Persian carpet that had been in Manchester too, the ordinary blue and red sort of carpet, a pinkish red like the cushions; Hugo said they did not match it quite, and Mollie said she would change them, but she never did; and we got to like the cushions that did not quite match, and we would not have liked to have them changed.

‘We thought you were not coming,’ said Mollie, looking up from her book. George pulled up another chair for me.

I threw the bunch of narcissi into Mollie’s lap:

‘A peace offering,’ I said. ‘I meant to come sooner; I started out quite early after lunch.’

‘You’ve had tea?’ asked Mollie, and I said, yes, had.

George had his pipe; he always had; he took it out of his mouth, and held out his book.

‘Have you read it?’ he asked. ‘Awfully good!’

I looked at the book; it was Aksakov’s _Memories of Childhood_; I had not read it; I turned over the pages, and read bits of it, here and there. I said:

‘I came to tell you, really, that I am engaged to Walter Sebright.’

I did not look at either of them, only at the book.

‘What?’ said George, sitting up sharply.

Mollie said:

‘Oh, Helen!’

They were both looking at me; I knew it and pretended not to see. I felt as though I were going to cry, and was determined not to.

‘Do you mean that, Helen?’ Mollie asked very gently.

I said:

‘Yes; are you surprised?’

She said:

‘Yes; very much surprised; I didn’t expect it at all!’

I looked at George, but his face was turned away; he was staring at the fire, bending forwards, away from me.

I said:

‘Won’t you congratulate me, either of you?’ and my voice sounded odd, and jerky, even to myself, ‘Won’t you give me your good wishes?’

‘Yes . . . oh surely, all good wishes . . .’ Mollie said, ‘but . . .’ She hesitated and I saw her look at George. . . .

‘If you are going back now, I will go with you,’ George said abruptly.

He knew, of course, that I had not meant to go back then, for I had only just come. Mollie looked at him again, surprised, I thought, and anxious.

I nearly said: ‘I am not going back!’

But I wanted to get away, and somehow, too, I had to do what George wanted.

I said:

‘Yes, I am going back now; but you needn’t come.’

He got up from his chair and went to get his hat it was hanging up on the landing, outside the door. I stood up too. Mollie took both my hands in hers.

She said:

‘I wish you happiness with all my heart, you do know that, my dear!’

I nodded; I felt I could not speak without crying, and I did not want to cry.

George was waiting for me outside, at the top of the stairs; he waited for me to pass and then followed me down.

We crossed the road to the pavement by the river, and turned Eastward, towards the bridges and the trams. We passed the two bridges, and Oakley Street, where my bus for Kensington would run; we did not, either of us, think about that. We were walking very quickly, along the river; the lamps were all lit now, broad streaks of light lay out in front of each, across the wet pavement and the road.

‘It isn’t true, what you said just now?’ George asked at last.

I said:

‘Yes; why should it not be true?’

‘I can’t believe it is true!’

‘You mean that no one would want to marry me?’

‘No,’ he said quietly, ‘I don’t mean that.’

We walked along without speaking; we were nearly at Chelsea Bridge now.

George stopped walking, and turned round:

‘Does Hugo know?’ he asked.

I said:

‘No. I haven’t seen Hugo.’

He leaned his elbows on the stone parapet and looked straight in front of him, across the river.

‘You know, Helen,’ he said, ‘you must not do this; you can’t understand what you are doing; you haven’t thought.’

I said:

‘I am tired of thinking’

‘I know it is not my business; you can say it is nothing to do with me; but it is; Hugo . . . and you are the best friends I have; I can’t stand by and see you . . . and Hugo messing up your lives . . .’

His voice was very low; I had never heard George’s voice like this.

I thought:

‘How he loves Hugo! Why do we love him so?’

I said:

‘I thought you liked Sophia?’

He said:

‘I do like her.’

‘And you like Walter Sebright too; you said you did.’

‘I do,’ he said, ‘I like him too, but not for you.’

I said:

‘That is for me to judge.’

He said:

‘No, not now; you don’t know what you are doing. You are unhappy and angry, and . . . oh Helen, why do we beat about the bush? You and Hugo love each other far too well to marry other people? You know that . . . I know it . . . and Hugo knows it too!’

I said:

‘I don’t think Hugo does.’

‘He does . . . . I know he does. Give him time, Helen. He will never care for anyone as he does for you.’

I said:

‘He leaves it to you, to say!’

‘Can’t you wait a little while? Six months, or three months even . . .? That is not very long to wait . . .’

I said:

‘I am sick of waiting. I don’t know even, that I want Hugo, now.’

George was silent; I knew how hard it must be for him to say these things, and I wanted to hurt him. There were sea gulls walking in the mud, at the edge of the river. They rose up in a cloud in front of us, calling and flapping their wings.

I said:

‘It is good of you to consider Hugo so much, but I don’t think he would be grateful to you.’

I said it in a hard, horrible voice.

George clasped his hands together; he clasped and unclasped his fingers, and said nothing at all.

I said:

‘I suppose you think I should wait for ever, on the chance of Hugo’s wanting me some day? You don’t mind what happens to me?’

I can’t bear now to think how I spoke to George; it was as though a devil was in me. I did not mean what I said, and I knew that I did not mean it; I would have waited for Hugo always, if I had thought he would want me ever; but I did not think so. That was not George’s fault.

George said:

‘I did not mean that, Helen. You know, surely, that I did not. Do you think I should have said all this, if I did not mind what happened to you?

‘It is not fair to Sebright,’ he said abruptly, ‘to marry him like this.’

I said:

‘That is his affair, and mine; you had better leave it alone.’

We walked on again; past Chelsea Bridge, and along Grosvenor Road. There was no parapet here, only railings, and the river showed through the iron bars, with the lamplight on it. Across the water, where the wharfs and warehouses are, there were more lights, and a noise of hammering. A train went past with lighted windows, across the railway bridge. I did not ask George to leave me; I did not want him to go. Twice I looked round at him.

‘Why does he mind so much?’ I wondered. ‘It is wonderful to mind so much about other people.’

I said once:

‘It is very dark for April.’

He said:

‘Yes, it is getting late.’

Lorries went past us, a train of lorries, with iron girders on them. There was a Salvation Army meeting at the corner of a street.

I said:

‘I should like to be religious.’

George said:

‘So should I.’

I wished already, that I had been kinder to George. I knew how hard it must have been for him to say all that to me. I was grateful to him for caring about it at all.

We had left the river now, and were walking through streets with more warehouses and yards. We came out soon to Westminster, and crossed the wide space in front of the Houses of Parliament. We stood and waited for a bus.

George said:

‘Forgive me, Helen. I am afraid I have made it worse. I am sorry, if I have.’

I wanted to say:

‘Forgive me, George. I love you for what you said. It was dear and brave of you to say it. It was like you, George.’

But there were people all round, near us, and my bus was coming, round the corner, and across to where we stood.

I only said:

‘It’s all right; you haven’t a bit. Good-bye.’

I held out my hand, and George took it.

Then I climbed up on to my bus, and went up the steps to the top. I turned round to wave to him again, but he did not see me. He was standing quite still, where I had left him, staring in front of him at the road.

XXIII

I did not write to Hugo. George told him, and Guy wrote to me at once.

‘Congratulations and good wishes,’ he said; that was all.

Cousin Delia asked me to bring Walter down to see her I said I would, the next week-end.

Hugo wrote later:

‘Helen dear, I hope you will be happy. I hope you have chosen right. Other people cannot judge for you, not even we, who have known you best.’

I thought:

‘He does not mind. He does not like Walter, but he does not mind.’

Walter took me to see his mother. She looked old to be his mother; much older than Cousin Delia. She had light blue eyes like his, and fair hair. Her hair was not so grey as Cousin Delia’s, but her face was much more lined. She was small, and like a bird, with quick, nervous movements. She was dressed in purple; a purple silk bodice, with a high collar, up round her chin. She was very neat and slim, and her face was pink, like a soft apple.

She lived in a high house, with steep, dark stairs. There were Indian things in the room; weapons, and powder horns, and inlaid tables. Walter’s grandfather had been in India; he was an Indian merchant who traded in rice. There were water-colours on the walls, of cottages, and churches in green trees; old-fashioned, rather charming pictures, but the room was dark all the same; the curtains were dark and heavy, and there was too much furniture; I felt very much a stranger in that room.

Mrs. Sebright kissed me in a fluttering, half-frightened way.

‘My dear, I am so glad to meet you,’ she said. ‘Walter has talked to me often about you. I should like to have seen you before.’

She made me sit down in a big chair; it had a chintz cover with purplish flowers on it; faded, dull sort of flowers.

‘I must look at you,’ she said, ‘you must let me look at you, my dear!’

She put on her spectacles, and looked at me. It was natural that she should want to look, but I felt embarrassed.

‘Yes, you are very pretty, very pretty indeed! Walter told me so. Walter is always right.’

She gave a little nervous laugh.

‘We must make friends now,’ she said; ‘you see, it seems so strange to me, that I do not know you at all. Walter has been such a good son to me, such a devoted son, and good sons make good husbands, so they say. . . . I am sure my Walter will. You are a fortunate young lady, my dear, though I say it, and I am sure you will do your best to deserve him.’

I said I hoped I should. I liked her for thinking so much of Walter; she was so naive, and so single-hearted; the attitude of my friends would have been inconceivable to her.

And I thought:

‘She knows him much better than they do, after all.’

She said:

‘You must tell me all about yourself. Your parents are dead, I believe?’

I told her that my father was dead, and my mother had married again.

‘Poor dear, poor dear, so you were all alone?’

I told her about Cousin Delia and Yearsly.

I said:

‘I was with her long before, after my father died.’

‘Ah, yes; and you had cousins there, to play with, I believe?’

I said:

‘Yes; two cousins—Guy and Hugo.’

‘They must be almost like brothers to you now?’

I said:

‘Yes; almost.’

‘Walter knows them, I think? He knew them at Oxford.’

I said:

‘He does not know them very well.’

‘They would not be quite Walter’s type, perhaps . . . you see, Walter is so clever, he does not care much for people who are not . . . but he will, of course, my dear, later on, if they are your cousins. He has a most affectionate nature, and I am sure they are very nice young men!’

I suppose I did not respond, for she added quickly:

‘I did not mean, of course, that your cousins were stupid, Walter has never said such a thing to me, oh, not at all, but I thought from what he told me that they were . . . just . . . not quite like Walter . . . he has, of course, a quite exceptional brain.’

I said:

‘Oh no; my cousins are not like Walter; but I love them very much; I hope he will be friends with them, more, later on.’

I did not mind what Mrs. Sebright said; I did not mind what Walter had told her about them.

I thought:

‘She feels about Walter as I do about Hugo; I am glad that some one feels about him like that.’

Walter came in then. He had left me alone with his mother for a talk. He stood beside her with his hand on her shoulder, and looked at me.

‘Wasn’t I right, Mother?’ he asked softly. ‘Isn’t she all I said?’

He looked flushed and happy; his eyes were shining; I wished he would not wear those black steel spectacles.

Grandmother went to call on Mrs. Sebright. Grandmother was the only person who seemed really pleased at the engagement.

She said:

‘I like your young man. He has brains and character. You might have done worse. You won’t be well off, not at all well off; but that does not matter; we all value money too highly, and you will have enough when I die,’

I don’t know what she said to Mrs. Sebright, or Mrs. Sebright to her, but she was not displeased.

She said:

‘A good woman, I think, but a fool; he must get his brains from his father. Stupid women often have clever sons; perhaps the clever men marry them. She will not trouble you, Helen, she won’t interfere, but you must be kind to her, and attentive.’

I said that I would try. I was grateful to Grandmother for being pleased at all.

XXIV

Guy and Hugo were not at Yearsly that week-end; they were sorry they could not come, Cousin Delia said.

She welcomed Walter, giving him both her hands, and looked at him hard, as his mother had looked at me; but she did not ask him questions. Some people said that Cousin Delia was hard to talk to, for she never asked you the ordinary things; she did not ask people how their relations were, as some women always do. She took people as they were, and left them alone; and she talked, when she did talk, about anything that was in her mind, or yours, at the moment.

She showed Walter some gems, Greek gems, in the library; he told her about them, their dates, and where they were made. He did not say they were decadent, or ‘too late,’ as I expected. He was polite to Cousin Delia, and treated her with respect.

He said:

‘She is not at all like her sons.’

I said:

‘Oh, Walter, I think her so like them both.’

He did not get on very well with Cousin John; that did not surprise me; Cousin John might seem dull to anyone who did not know him well.

I took him to Joseph and Mathew, and the Elliots at the farm. He was awkward with them all, and did not know what to say. They shook hands with us, and wished us joy, but they were not hearty, and as we turned away, I heard Elliot say to his wife:

‘I aye thought it would have been Mr. Hugo!’

I don’t think Walter heard what he said.

I took Walter to the Temple, and into the High Wood. He made love to me and kissed me, and called me pretty names; I would not have thought he could say the things he did, and I was glad he did; but I did not show him the Happy Tree, nor the Frog Pond, nor the Jasmine Gate.

XXV

Cousin Delia came to see me in my bed, as she used to when I was little.

She said:

‘Dear Heart, are you happy?’

I said:

‘I don’t know, Cousin Delia. Ought I to be?’

She said:

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t; but some people are. It is better to be happy.’

I said:

‘Yes. I know it would be better.’

She stood beside my bed, and looked across it at the window, and the branches of the trees. There was a moon outside and we could see the branches; I had pulled the curtain back.

She said:

‘Poor Hugo; I am thinking of my Hugo.’

I said:

‘You need not be sorry for him.’

She looked down at me.

She said:

‘No? Need I not?’

I said:

‘No. Be sorry for me; and Walter.’

She said:

‘Walter has got what he wants. Not many people get that.’

I said:

‘No, not many people; I know that; and I don’t think Walter really has.’

She said:

‘Dear Heart, don’t be impatient; don’t decide too soon.’

I said:

‘I have decided.’

She bent down and kissed my forehead.

She said:

‘I like your Walter; and he is very happy.’

XXVI

Walter took me to see his sister Maud. She was the headmistress of a school at Lessingham; a County Secondary School.

We travelled by train for nearly two hours; we were to spend the night with Maud, at the school.

We sat opposite to each other in the train; we had two corner seats.

I thought:

‘It will be like this when I am married to Walter. We shall travel together always. How funny that will be!’

Walter had bought me newspapers at the station. He bought a lot of them and put them on the seat beside me; there was _Vogue_, and _Colour_, and the _Daily Mirror_; and I laughed.

I said:

‘I should not have thought you would buy papers like this. Have you ever bought any of these before?’

Walter laughed too.

He said:

‘No, of course not; I have never had any one to buy them for, before.’

He had no newspaper himself; he did not read them; he had told me that before. He took out a German book, _Der Hittitische Kult_, and began to read it, but soon he put it down. I was looking at him, and now he looked at me.

He said:

‘Not even that, when you are here. I wonder if you know how much that means?’

He leaned across, and took my hands in his.

He said:

‘Perhaps, you will make me human. Perhaps I shall be quite different when I am married to you.’

I bent forward too and kissed his forehead; I felt curiously moved.

I thought:

‘Perhaps, he really needs me; perhaps I have something to give him that he really wants . . . beyond mere falling in love.’

I felt that there were depths in him I had not fathomed.

I thought:

‘Can I do it? Am I what he thinks me?’

And then I thought:

‘Perhaps I shall love him more than any one, in time.’

People got into the train at the next station. Walter talked to me about his sister Maud.

He said:

‘I hope so much you will like her’; and I felt behind his words, the hope, more doubtful, that she might like me.

He said:

‘She is a very remarkable woman; she took a I.I. at Cambridge, you know, that is not common for women, and she did it all herself. She was only seventeen when my father died. She was at school then, of course, and insisted on staying on. My mother would have taken her away, I think, and gone to live in the country, but Maud was right. She said it was better for us all, to keep her on at school, and at college too; she would earn more in the end, and of course she was right. She paid her own way with scholarships, all the way up, just as I did afterwards, and she helped with me too. She kept me up to the mark, and my mother too. My mother was inclined to spoil me. She thought I was delicate and that the work at St. Paul’s was too much for me, but Maud insisted on my working hard, and again, I am sure she was right. She is not so gentle as my mother, of course, nor so affectionate, but I admire her very much, and I am grateful to her.’

I said:

‘I don’t expect she will approve of me!’

Walter hesitated.

‘Not quite, at first, perhaps, but you mustn’t mind that. She does judge people on their merits, really, in the end, though sometimes she is prejudiced at first.’

I was afraid that I should not like Maud, and I was sure that she would not like me.

XXVII

Maud was waiting for us in her ‘Private Room.’ We came to it through long corridors with notices on the walls, and a place with pegs, and rows and rows of hats and coats. There was a smell of disinfectant, and ink, and books. It was different from the smell at Ellsfield, but reminded me partly of that.

The ‘Private Room’ was pleasanter. There was a big window with green serge curtains, and a table with a green serge cover, and lots of books on it. There were daffodils on the table in a green, ‘art pottery’ jug, and reproductions of pictures by Watts on the walls, in broad, dark oak frames.

Maud came forward to meet us. She was tall and fair; she seemed much taller and more powerful than Walter; she looked healthier, and more athletic. Her hair was parted in the middle, and pushed forward, very neatly, with little combs behind each ear. She was wearing a very clean, well ironed, white silk shirt, with a dark blue tie, a tie-pin, and a long, navy blue serge skirt; she had pince-nez, rimless ones, fastened by a fine, black cord.

She smiled in a bright, business-like way, as though she were accustomed to smiling.

‘My dear Walter, how do you do? How do you do, Helen?’

She kissed us both, brightly too, and led us back to the tea-table, which was waiting by the hearth-rug. There was no fire, though the day was rather cold; the kettle was boiling on a brass spirit lamp, on the table.

‘Your train must have been late,’ she said, as she made the tea. ‘I expected you a quarter of an hour ago. Fortunately, to-day is my “free day,” and I have an hour and a half, quite free, after tea.’

She made us feel that it was our fault that the train was late, but that she forgave us.

Walter murmured an apology, and she smiled again:

‘It is of no consequence, none whatever. I have kept myself entirely at your disposal this afternoon. I had to take the chair at a staff meeting between three and four; we have a staff-committee now, you know, Walter, to decide on internal questions of policy in the school, slight variations in curriculum, and so forth, as far as our governing body will permit: it meets on Saturday afternoon. I find it a useful experiment. I find that it encourages keenness in the staff, more especially the younger members, if they feel they have some say in the management of the school. I have, of course, a casting vote myself, but I seldom use it. It is surprising to find how often we are unanimous, or practically so. Sugar, Helen and milk?’

She gave me sugar and milk, without waiting for my reply, and handed me the cup.

‘Let me see,’ she went on, ‘where were you at school? Walter did tell me, I believe.’

I said:

‘Ellsfield, in Surrey; Miss Ellis’s school.’

‘Ah yes, of course! They do not take the Higher Certificate there, I think? There was some discussion about it at the last Headmistresses’ Conference. Miss Ellis takes, shall we say, an independent line?’

I said:

‘I don’t think they did many examinations. I believe Miss Ellis didn’t approve of them.’

‘Quite, quite; and not many of the girls would go on to the Universities, I suppose?’

‘Some did, I think; oh, several did. You could go if you liked.’

Maud smiled.

‘No compulsory abstention,’ she said, ‘but not unduly encouraged, I suppose. Of course here we have quite the opposite idea. We train our girls to regard a University training as the natural culmination of their education. Under present conditions they cannot always afford it, but it is surprising how many can, when once the girl and her family are made to feel it the natural and proper thing. There ought to be more scholarships, of course, for Oxford and Cambridge are too expensive for most girls of the class who come to us, but the Provincial Universities are now excellent. A number of our girls go to Birmingham and more still to the University College here.’

I said:

‘It must be very convenient to have a college here.’

‘Yes, a good departure, quite good. Standard not very high yet, but that will come. I thoroughly approve of this movement for increasing the number of University Colleges in Provincial towns. By the way, Walter,’ she went on, ‘I want to speak to you about that last regulation of the Board of Faculties and Arts, about the P.Q.T. External Examinations, you know the one I mean, 1346; I think it is on the new schedule.’

She took up a bunch of papers from the table beside her and began to look through them.

‘Here it is,’ she said, and began to read it aloud.

It was something about the qualifications necessary for anyone going in for some particular examination; it conveyed nothing, of course, to me. Walter said something about its not making much difference, and she interrupted him:

‘I entirely disagree with you, Walter. Take the case, for instance, of a girl in the Vth Form who had already passed 3y and 6b in the Higher Certificate; her position would be quite anomalous!’

‘But do many girls pass 3y and 6b, and nothing else?’

‘Not many, but some do. In any case it ought to be made quite clear; would such a girl be eligible, or not?’

‘You see,’ she said, turning to me, ‘so many of our girls take the London University External degree, and as Walter is now a Member of the University, I always apply to him in my difficulties.’

Walter said:

‘I am afraid I can’t be any use to you over this, Maud. I really have nothing to do with the External Examinations. You had better apply to the Secretary of the Board of Faculties, direct.’

There was irritation in his voice; he held out his cup.

‘May I have some more tea?’ he asked.

‘Certainly, certainly. I did not see that you had finished; and, Helen, let me give you some more. You did say milk and sugar, I think. Walter, please give Helen some cake. Yes, I think I had better apply to the Board of Faculties direct. It is always best to go to the Fountain Head. But you must support me on the Board, if the question is raised. Helen must excuse us talking so much shop,’ and she turned brightly to me: ‘We Academic people have so much shop to talk, and so little opportunity.’

Walter said:

‘I find plenty of opportunity!’

‘Ah, but you are at the Fountain Head! That is one of the advantages of University life over that of a school. It has that advantage, undoubtedly. But what is Helen most interested in? We must make friends, mustn’t we? Now that we are to be sisters-in-law!’

Walter said:

‘Helen is interested in a great many things. Literature and pictures, and music . . . aren’t you, Helen?’

I felt like a child, being discussed and drawn out by grown-up people.

I said:

‘Yes. I am interested in that sort of thing, chiefly, I suppose.’

‘I see,’ said Maud, artistic. ‘Well, that is a very important side of life. I always teach my girls to appreciate Art. We have lectures on Art, every alternate week, in the Winter terms, with lantern slides; and literature too; three of our girls took A.A. in the English Literature paper of the L.L.U.’

‘Helen is a great dancer too!’

Maud gave a little laugh.

‘The lighter side,’ she said, ‘that we can hardly call Art!’

I wondered why Walter had said it. I thought he might have known that Maud would not count dancing ‘Art.’

‘It can be Art,’ said Walter doggedly. ‘Have you seen the Russian Ballet?’

I was surprised that Walter should have seen it himself.

Maud laughed again, her quick, business-like laugh.

‘I am afraid I have no time for Ballets,’ she said:

‘Helen will not find much time to dance when she is married, I am afraid. I am afraid Academic life will seem a little strange to you at first. We are poor, dull people you know, my dear, but we have our good points, if you take us as you find us! And now, would you like a walk round? We have extended the playing field since you were here last, Walter, and there are some new books in the Classical Library.’

Walter and I were not alone all the evening. There were prayers for the boarders, and supper in a big dining hall, only two tables, at the end in use, for the day girls were not there.

In the morning we went to church with Maud and two other mistresses, and the boarders.

We were alone for a little, in Maud’s room, before lunch.

‘When did you go to the Russian Ballet?’ I asked.

And Walter said:

‘When you said you liked dancing; in the tea-shop near the British Museum. I went the next evening.’

I took his hand.

I said:

‘That was dear of you. Did you like it?’

He said:

‘I don’t know if I liked it really. Not very much, perhaps, but I liked to know what you liked . . .’

He hesitated, and smiled shyly.

‘I thought it made me understand you better.’

I felt, somehow, nearer to Walter after that visit. I felt that there was an understanding between us in relation to Maud. He did not say it and I did not say it, but I felt that he was on my side, and not on hers; that he was resisting what she stood for, and defending me.

I had dreaded the meeting with Maud, and now it was over I did not mind her; I was not afraid of her: it did not seem to me that she would count.

XXVIII

We were to be married in July, as soon as Walter’s term ended. Grandmother had arranged that, I think, with Walter.

Cousin Delia said:

‘Wait a little. Wait till the Autumn, or even Christmas.’

Mrs. Sebright said July seemed rather soon.

Walter said:

‘Why wait, now it is settled?’

I let them arrange it as they liked. I felt all the time quite passive, as though things happened, and decisions were made, quite separately from me; it was not my business to interfere; I just watched.

And I thought:

‘Now this is happening, now that. Now she is engaged to be married. Now she is looking for a house. Now they are getting clothes for her. Now, sheets. Soon there will be a wedding in a church. And what then?’

It was as though I were watching it all from a long way off.

We found a house in Hampstead; number seven, Edinburgh Terrace. It was a stucco house, semi-detached, with a garden back and front, and a high flight of steps up to the front door. There was a stucco wall between the road and the garden in front, and a straight path that sloped up from the gate to the front door, so that the house itself looked high up, higher than it really was. There were lilac bushes at the side of the house, where the back door was, and a trellis gate that led through to the garden behind. There was a verandah at the back, with iron steps leading down to the back garden. The gardens were oblong strips of grass, neglected for some time. The whole terrace had been built, I should think, about 1850; it was old-fashioned, and a little dilapidated; much more attractive, I thought, than more modern houses, and Walter thought it cheap.

I wanted to have the outside of it painted; it had been painted a sort of cream colour once, and I wanted it white, and the windows and door bright green. It was the sort of house that ought to be white and green.

Walter said he thought it would do as it was. We could decorate it inside, and then see how much money we had left. We had five hundred pounds to spend on decorating and furniture; Mrs. Sebright said that would be ample; Grandmother said we must do the best we could with that, and that she would make up the extras. I could see that she did not think it would be enough.

Cousin Delia came to see the house. She stood on the steps and looked at the front garden.

She said:

‘You should grow roses here; red roses, I think. Richmond, or General Macarthur; and a pond in the middle, perhaps.’

I said:

‘Will roses grow in London?’

She said:

‘Oh surely they will! Do you think they won’t?’

Cousin Delia seemed always a little lost when she came to London; a little bit as though she were walking in a dream.

She said:

‘It would be dreadful, of course, if the roses would not grow.’

I showed her the rooms inside; upstairs and down; She said:

‘It is a nice little house. You shall have the “Little chair,” from Yearsly. It would go well, I think, in that drawing-room. Your chairs must be small, for these rooms.’

She said that the paint on the stairs would not do. It was dark brown paint, and very ugly, but Walter thought we should leave it.

She said:

‘It is all wrong, that brown paint, you must have it taken off.’

Mrs. Sebright said we must have the drains relaid. I had thought we might leave the drains.

Maud came up from Lessingham to see the house. She said we should have the paint inside green.

She said:

‘It saves work; white paint gives far more trouble.’

But I did not want green paint inside.

In the bedroom, she said:

‘You can have a nice fumed oak suite, in here. There are excellent fumed oak suites at the Army and Navy Stores. I have furnished the bedrooms in our teachers’ hostel with their suites. Well made, and in very good taste.’

Walter said:

‘Helen does not like fumed oak.’

‘Oh really! I thought every one liked fumed oak now. What does Helen like?’

They always talked of me as though I was not there.

Walter said:

‘She likes old furniture. Old mahogany and . . . and walnut.’

Maud laughed:

‘Oh, of course,’ she said, ‘we should all like old walnut best, I imagine. I am afraid Helen will find that a professor’s salary will hardly allow of furnishing in that style!’

She smiled at me, in what I think she meant to be an encouraging way.

She said:

‘Helen will soon learn, I am sure. A poor professor’s wife can hardly expect to live in the way she has been accustomed to; even clothes, for instance, the cost of clothes will have to be considered,’ and she glanced at mine, ‘but I feel sure that Helen will soon learn. We must all help her’; and she smiled again.

I began to hate Maud. I wondered if she wanted to make it all seem horrid.

I said:

‘We can have packing-cases with chintz frills. Sophia Lane Watson has those in her room and they look very nice. I would rather have that than fumed oak.’

‘Rather too, what shall we say? . . . Bohemian, perhaps, to live in packing-cases. I am sure you will have ample for your needs, if it is laid out carefully, with foresight, and consideration.’

Mrs. Sebright gave us a sideboard; it was a big mahogany sideboard that had belonged to Walter’s grandfather.

It was ugly and took up a great deal of room; and she gave us a portrait of his grandfather too, the India merchant; Walter was not at all like him. I could not say I did not want them, but they spoiled the rooms.

I thought:

‘It is only the dining-room, after all; we shall not sit in it very much.’

George and Hugo came to see the house when it was almost finished. Mostly they liked it, but Hugo said:

‘Oh, must you have that sideboard?’

And I saw George nudge his elbow, to stop him speaking about it.

I said:

‘I rather like it. It belonged to Walter’s grandfather, who was a merchant in India. It is interesting to have it, I think.’

Hugo said:

‘Oh, yes . . . yes, of course! If there is a reason for it, that is quite different!’

He looked at the portrait of the grandfather, a big portrait in oils, badly painted, but he said nothing about it.

He said:

‘That room upstairs is awfully nice! that drawing-room, with the steps down to the garden, and I am sure you can make the garden awfully nice.’

I had hardly seen Hugo, since I had been engaged; only once or twice, at parties; at Campden Hill Square, and at Mollie’s. I did not want to see him much just then.

He gave me an alabaster bowl; old white alabaster; I think it was Chinese. I put it on the drawing-room chimney-piece, in the middle, and straight silver candlesticks, from George and Mollie, on either side. Walter thought it looked rather bare. He thought it would have been more convenient to put a clock there, but he didn’t mind about things like that.

We had old walnut furniture in the drawing-room, after all, for Cousin Delia and Cousin John gave me a walnut cabinet, a beautiful thing, like one at Yearsly, and Grandmother gave me a writing-desk, Queen Anne walnut too.

XXIX

Cousin Delia came with me to buy sheets.

It was June now, and the house was nearly ready. We were to be married on the third of July.

She bought a great many sheets, and bath towels, and pillow-cases. We were sitting facing each other, beside the counter, on two high chairs; and then, quite suddenly, when we had nearly finished, I felt that I could not marry Walter; I felt terrified at what I was doing; I felt as though I was caught in a trap.

I don’t quite know what did it, but I think it was the sheets. Cousin Delia was feeling them in her fingers, and she told me to feel them. They were very fine and soft, and I liked the feeling of them, and then I thought of them on a bed, and me in bed, and Walter; and I realized that he would sleep with me, and be as close to me as that; I had not, somehow, thought of that before, and I felt it was impossible; I could not go to bed with Walter.

I said:

‘Cousin Delia, I don’t think I want any sheets.’

Cousin Delia looked at me, and I think she knew what I was feeling, for she did not ask me why. She waited a minute or two, and then, when the shopman came back, she said, quite quietly:

‘I think we will leave the sheets for to-day. Send me the bath towels and the face towels; that will be enough. We can send them back afterwards, if we want to,’ she said to me, and she took me into the tea-room which was in that shop.

We sat in two basket chairs, very low, with cushions in them, in a corner, away from the door. There were little white cloths with green shamrocks round the edge on the tables, and a band was playing, a string band, with women in green uniforms playing. A waitress came round with a big tray of cakes, very gorgeous cakes, that you took with a fork.

I kept saying to myself:

‘It can’t be true. I can’t be going to marry him, really, in two weeks. This cannot be going to happen to me, this horrible thing!’

I wished that the band would stop playing and let me think.

I looked at Cousin Delia; she was looking at me. She put out her hand and let it rest on mine.

‘Dear Heart,’ she said very gently, ‘it is not too late. Don’t do this, unless you are sure.’

I said:

‘I want to think. I don’t know what I am doing. I didn’t until just now.’

XXX

I went to Walter that evening after dinner. I went out alone, and to his house. I asked to see him, and was afraid I should see his mother, but she was upstairs, in the drawing-room, and he came down alone.

He came into the dining-room; there was a smell of fish there, but the dinner was cleared away. There was gas alight in the room, over the table; the maid had lit it when she showed me in; it had lit with a loud report, like a gun.

He came up to me and took my hands.

‘What is it?’ he asked me quickly. ‘What has happened?’

I said:

‘It is all a mistake. I cannot marry you. I am sorry.’

He said:

‘Why not?’

I said:

‘What do you mean?’

‘It is all my fault. It is not fair to you either. I don’t love you enough or in the right way, at all.’

He said:

‘You will love me in time. I know you will. I know you don’t yet; not as I love you.’

I said:

‘I am afraid not. That is why I have come. I ought not to have let it go on so long. Somehow, I did not understand. I don’t think I shall marry any one, ever at all. I don’t think I ever could!’

And then I cried; it was stupid; it was the last moment in the world to cry, but a sob came in my throat, and then another, and I sobbed out loud, and Walter took me in his arms and comforted me.

And it was over. I had meant to be cold and firm, and I could not. I felt so frightened; frightened of life, and of myself, and he was very kind. He seemed much older than me, and much wiser; he seemed just then all I wanted him to be.

He took me back to Campden Hill Square, and said good-bye to me on the step as he had said it that evening in March, that seemed now, long ago.

He said:

‘It will be better when we are married. Only two weeks more to wait now.’

And I knew then that it was bound to come; that I must go through with it; and I did not know whether it was a mistake or not.

XXXI

We were married on the third of July, at St. Mary Abbots Church.

Those two weeks of waiting were terrible, but they passed, as everything does, in the end.

I thought:

‘Twelve days . . .’ then: ‘Eleven days . . .’ then: ‘Ten . . .’ and then: ‘Four days . . . three days . . . two days . . .’

I thought:

‘It must feel like this if one is diving from a high bridge, from a railway bridge, down into a river.’

—I don’t know why I thought of a railway bridge, but I did—‘It must feel like this, while one is waiting to jump.’

And I thought:

‘It must feel like this if one is going to be hung; counting the days, and knowing, quite for certain, that something terrific will happen to you in the end.’

And then I thought:

‘It has happened to other people; to Cousin Delia, and to Grandmother, and to people I pass every day, in the street.’

And I thought:

‘If they have gone through with it, I can.’

Nunky came up with Cousin Delia, to dress me for the wedding. I had a white satin dress, like all brides’ dresses, and a veil that had been Mary Geraldine’s wedding veil, and roses from Yearsly, golden and white.

There was a red carpet, and a great many people. Guy and Hugo were there, and Mollie and George, and Anthony Cowper, and Ralph Freeman, and his sister, and Sophia, and the Lacey girls, and Faith Vincent, and vague cousins of mine, and cousins of Walter’s, and Mrs. Sebright, of course, and Maud; and there were two uncles of Walter’s; one was a schoolmaster in the North of England, and one, a solicitor in the West; they came to London on purpose for the wedding, and I liked them, particularly the schoolmaster; and there were people that had to be asked, friends of Grandmother’s, and friends of Mrs. Sebright’s.

Cousin John gave me away, and Mr. Furze was the best man, and Mr. Vincent, from Yearsly, came up on purpose to help with the service.

My relations sat on one side of the church, and Walter’s on the other; there were more of mine.

There was a good deal of music. Guy had chosen a chorale that they sang at the end; but Mrs. Sebright chose the hymns. None of that seemed to matter very much; and afterwards there was a party and a cake, at Campden Hill Square.

Walter was dressed in a tail coat; he looked quite different; it made it seem queerer, somehow, and more like a dream.

I walked up the aisle of the church with Cousin John while the choir sang ‘Oh Perfect Love, All Human Thought Transcending’; and Walter and Mr. Furze were waiting for us at the top. I had never been to a wedding before, and only twice to this church when the banns were being read and Grandmother said we had better go. It seemed odd to see Mr. Vincent there; he belonged so much to Yearsly, and the little old church with so few people in it, but he smiled at me, and I was glad.

Then he said the things about Holy Matrimony, and asked us the questions, and we answered, first Walter and then I, and then there were prayers and hymns, and the vicar of the parish preached a sermon, and then there was the chorale that Guy had chosen—a Bach chorale that he used to sing with the waits sometimes at Christmas; I liked to hear that again, and I was glad that Guy had wanted to choose it.

Then we went into the vestry and signed our names, and other people came too, and signed their names. Cousin John and Guy signed, and Walter’s two uncles, and they were all talking.

And I thought:

‘Now I am married. There is no escape now.’

And there seemed to be a great singing noise in the church, though really it was quiet; a sort of noise like the sea on a beach, or wind in trees.

Outside the vestry, Hugo was waiting. He said good-bye to me there, for he did not come on to the party. He stopped me in the shadow of the aisle, as I came out with Walter, and said Good-bye.

He said:

‘Dear, God bless you. Be happy.’

And he took my hand; and then he went away; he seemed somehow to drift away, in the shadow, at the side; and we walked down the middle of the church to the door.

There was a motor-car outside, and we got into it. We were alone in the motor, driving back to Campden Hill Square, and Walter kissed me, very seriously, and we sat very still. I think he was a little frightened too, now it was done.

The drawing-room at Campden Hill Square was full of people, and the dining-room too; there was food in the dining-room, a wedding cake, and ices, and claret cup, and things like a supper at a dance; and every one came up and shook hands with Walter and me, and talked to us; and Walter was introduced to my relations, and I was introduced to his; and there was a great noise of people talking all round, like there is at an evening party; it was like an evening party, though it was only twelve o’clock.

Mr. Furze came and spoke to me too.

He said:

‘It is not very long since our first meeting, in the British Museum. That was a very different scene!’

I said:

‘Yes; different; but it seems to me a long time ago.’

He said:

‘Four months, not quite four months, A great deal can happen in four months.’

He smiled at me, but he looked sad, I thought, and I wondered why.

XXXII

After a time they called me away, upstairs, and took off my wedding gown and dressed me in other new clothes, a brown coat and skirt, and a hat with a long feather, and a fur neck thing; all these were new too; I had been to shops with Cousin Delia to buy them.

And then we got into the same motor that had brought us from the church. Some one had lent it, but I can’t remember who, and Cousin John shut the door of the motor with a bang, and people shouted and waved to us, and Anthony Cowper threw some rice, and some one else confetti. Some of the confetti got into my umbrella, I don’t know how; it fell out a long time after, on the platform, when I opened the umbrella; that was on the journey back, after our honeymoon was over.

We drove to Euston, for we were going up to Carlisle the first night, and then on to the farmhouse on the Roman Wall, where Walter had been staying when we met him there.

It was a long journey; too long, perhaps, and people were in the carriage until Crewe.

The funny thing is, that I don’t remember that journey distinctly. I remember getting into the train at Euston and getting out at Carlisle, but in between it is a sort of blur; I only remember looking out of the window, at the rails, running along beside us, and thinking:

‘I might throw myself out on to those. That would be a way out of it still.’

But I knew I would not throw myself out really. That was nearly at the end of the journey, after passing Preston, and the place where the railway runs near to the sea.

It was evening when we reached Carlisle, but quite light, for it was summer and the days were longer there than in the South.

We got into another motor and drove to the hotel. A room had been engaged for us at that hotel, and the motor had been ordered; everything seemed to happen automatically, as though we were puppets, and somebody else was moving us by strings; at least, I felt like that; I don’t know if Walter did. I suppose it was he who had arranged these things, or he and Grandmother together.

People at the hotel came out to meet us; a sort of concierge man in uniform, and the proprietress of the hotel, who was fat and smiling, with black hair. They took us upstairs, and another man came after with the luggage. They took us along a passage, to a big room with a wardrobe in it. Bedrooms do have wardrobes in them as a rule, I know, my own bedroom has, but this wardrobe was different; it was so big that it seemed to dominate the room, it was a sort of triple wardrobe; it had two doors with looking-glasses at each end, and a long plain part in the middle, and the doors came open too easily, so that they swung out, and you saw yourself reflected somewhere, wherever you walked in that room. I did not want to see myself. I did not like that big wardrobe.

There was a big bed too; bright red mahogany like the wardrobe, with very thick, shining posts, and red curtains at the back. There were heavy red curtains at the windows, with big mahogany curtain rods and rings, and lace curtains inside. It was a bow window-looking out into the street, but it was not a noisy street.

The proprietress said it was her ‘Best bedroom.’

‘We keep it for these occasions,’ she said, smiling.

She meant to be kind, I could see. She thought how nice it was to be just married; I could see that she thought that. I suppose that she had been married a great many years, longer even, than I have now.

She said:

‘Dinner will be served whenever you wish; in the dining-room, or a private room if you prefer it?’

And I said quickly:

‘In the dining-room, please.’

I didn’t want to be alone with Walter.

Then she went out, and a maid came in with hot water, and I poured it out and washed; and there was the wedding ring on my finger; I could see it through the water and the soapsuds in the basin, when I held my hand right down.

Walter was standing behind me; he saw the ring too.

He said:

‘My hand now,’ and took hold of my wrist, and I laughed, and drew my hand away, and I dried it quickly on the towel, and told him to go downstairs, and I would come.

I wanted to brush my hair, and clean my face, and I was shy of Walter being there.

I thought:

‘How shall I ever take off my clothes, with Walter in the room? Will he stay downstairs? Will he understand that I want him to stay downstairs?’

After dinner, we went out for a walk. That was much better than staying indoors. We walked about the streets, and looked at the Castle, and the road to Scotland; and Walter talked about the Romans, and the Picts and the Scots.

It did not get dark till nearly ten o’clock, and then we had to go in.

As I went upstairs I thought:

‘Other people have been through this. Grandmother, and Cousin Delia, and even the proprietress of this hotel. They do not tell us about it, because they can’t. I shall not be able to tell my daughter.’

XXXIII

Next day, we went on to Howsteads, to the farmhouse; we went early and had lunch at the farm. They were pleasant people there, and they seemed to like Walter. I was glad to be there.

We stayed six weeks at that farmhouse. We spent the days out of doors, going long walks over the Fells, with sandwiches and books in a rucksack, and not coming in, very often, till it was dark.

Walter had brought Gibbon with him, and he read it aloud to me, lying out on the Fellside, with the sound of plovers calling, and sheep cropping, and sometimes a stream rippling over stones, and we were happy. It was a new world to me, and a new life. It was all quite different from my old life at home, and the country here was not Hugo’s country, and the books we read were not Hugo’s books.

And I thought:

‘I shall learn to know Walter’s world as well as I knew Hugo’s; his is a bigger, stronger world; it needs more knowing.’

I found Gibbon interesting, and Walter explained it well. Once he was annoyed with me because I said that _Love among the Ruins_ made me feel ‘past greatness’ more than Gibbon, but he was not seriously annoyed. I said I would read _Love among the Ruins_ in exchange for his reading Gibbon, and when I had read it he said that anyhow the last line was sense, and he kissed me, and we did not argue about it any more.

When we came back to London, we were almost used to each other.

I thought:

‘How funny it is that I was so shy of Walter. I am so close to him now. It is wonderful to be so close to anyone.’

XXXIV

Mrs. Sebright had engaged maids for us; a cook and house-parlourmaid. The cook was called Sarah, the house-parlourmaid Louise. She was younger than the cook, and pretty, but Mrs. Sebright said she was not so good a servant.

The house was all ready for us. Mrs. Sebright had ordered in food, and she was waiting there to receive us. She was like a little bird, fluttering from room to room; showing us little things she had done; muslin curtains tacked up behind wash-stands, rubber knobs on the floors to prevent doors banging backwards, and so on; she did so hope I would not mind, she said.

I did not mind, of course. I thought how nice it all was; I thought:

‘How delightful to have a house of one’s own!’

I thought how kind Mrs. Sebright was, and how easy it would be to get on with her.

I thought:

‘I will never let her feel in the way. I will never let her feel that I have taken Walter away from her.’

And so we settled down in our own home, and enjoyed it. Walter began work again. His University work did not begin till October, but besides that, he was writing a book on proto-Hittite scripts. He was only at the beginning of the book, the very beginning, and it would take many years to finish, he said, but it would be the only book on that subject, or at least on that aspect of the subject.

He had a study upstairs, looking out on the garden behind. He was very pleased with the study; he said it was so quiet, and there was good wall space for books.

He would work there all the morning, while I did housekeeping and gardening. I found the housekeeping great fun. I bought cookery books, and made Sarah try new recipes, French and Italian ones that I found in books. She did not mind trying, though they did not always turn out very well. She treated me as though I were a child whom she was humouring; she made me feel always, that she knew much more about it all than I did, but then, that was quite true, and I did not mind.

I used to go marketing with a basket; there was a little group of shops, down the hill, two streets away; sometimes I used to go there, and sometimes further afield. It was interesting to me to discover the prices of things, for I had never heard prices discussed, and knew nothing about them. I did not know that chicken cost more than rabbit. At Yearsly, we had both fairly often, and both were supplied at home; it never seemed to make any difference which we had, and at Campden Hill Square, it was much the same; chickens and game and rabbits came from Yearsly, and I never heard Grandmother speak about the price of food.

Sometimes now they sent hampers to me, and that was nice, but I enjoyed more to buy my own food. It seems odd now to think that one ever could enjoy it.

The first trouble was when Maud came to lunch, on the 1st of October, and I had bought a pheasant. It was expensive; I was surprised to find how expensive it was, but we always had pheasants at Yearsly on the 1st of October; Cousin John always went out to shoot them in the morning, and Guy with him as a rule, and some were sent to Grandmother; these, of course, she did not get till the next day. I would have had some too, if I had waited, for Cousin John sent some to me too that year; I might have known he would, but I did not think of that at all; I only wanted a nice lunch for Maud, and in the shop I saw pheasants, and I remembered it was the first, and I thought:

‘That will be just the thing for Maud! I must try and please Maud, for Walter’s sake.’

The pheasant cost fifteen shillings, and I bought it, and Maud was not pleased at all. She remarked on it at once.

She said:

‘Pheasant already! I did not think they were in season yet!’

And I said:

‘It is the first to-day.’

She said:

‘The first?’

‘The 1st of October. I don’t know how they got them in the shop so early, though.’

She said:

‘My dear child, you don’t mean to say you bought a pheasant the first day they came in?’

And I said:

‘Yes; I saw it in the shop, and I remembered it was the first. Guy will have gone down to Yearsly to-day; he always does.’

Then Maud asked me what it had cost, and I told her fifteen shillings, and she took in a deep breath, and looked at Walter, and Walter looked uncomfortable. Maud asked him whether he made me a housekeeping allowance and he said he didn’t, and then Maud asked me how much I spent on my housekeeping every week, and I said I did not know.

And then Maud said I must keep accounts. She said it was most important.

After lunch, she began to show me how to do them. She had an elaborate method, ‘double entry’ she called it, which was supposed to show quite clearly if one had made a mistake. I tried to understand it and to use it, but it was really no use to me, for when the sum came out wrong, which was very often, I could not understand at all how to make it come right. Afterwards, I asked Mollie to show me her way, and that was better. There was much less system in Mollie’s accounts than in Maud’s, and I understood them much better. Now, I have still to do accounts, for Walter likes me to, and in all these years I have grown accustomed to it, but they do not come right very often, even now; I have never learned to be efficient, as Mollie learned with her father; you cannot develop what is not there at all; Walter does not realize that; I do, now.

That was an unhappy afternoon. Maud went on and on. She seemed to think that it was an arithmetic lesson, and that I was a stupid child. I always was stupid at arithmetic, I know, but she made it worse, and all the time, I resented her interfering. I felt angry, and rebellious, and not really ashamed of myself, as she seemed to expect me to be.

I kept saying to myself:

‘I must not quarrel with Walter’s sister. I must be polite to her. I am sure she means to be kind.’

But I was not sure, really. I felt always that underneath there was a fight going on, between Maud and me, for Walter. It was not quite a personal fight; she stood for one side of life, one attitude towards life, and I for the opposite, and Walter was wavering between.

It was true, of course, that I had been silly to buy the pheasant, I realized that, and it was true, too, that I was stupid over accounts, and did not know how to manage, and organize, and yet I felt underneath that there were some things I knew and Maud did not, some things I could understand, that Maud never would, only my things did not seem to count when Maud was there.

She did not go away till after tea.

Generally, Walter and I went out in the afternoon. He worked in the morning, and again after tea, but he had kept the afternoon free, so far, and we used to go out and walk on Hampstead Heath, or sometimes have a ride on the top of a bus. Walter had not been much on the tops of buses; he went by Underground because it was quicker, and he was always in a hurry to be where he was going. It had never occurred to him that the actual process of going, should be enjoyed, not, he said, till he met me. Hugo always went on the tops of buses, and I had got the habit, I suppose, from him. He would sometimes spend a whole afternoon on the top of a bus; getting on at random, and going wherever the bus went, to the very end. He used to see things from the tops of buses; he used to watch the people and the streets; different sorts of people, and different sorts of streets, and different sorts of houses. He used to get quite excited sometimes about people he saw like that. Walter never looked at people or things he passed; he could read a book in the Underground, he said, and not on a bus, besides its being quicker.

It was a joke between us at first, and so sometimes to please me he would come on a bus, in those first weeks of ours. But this afternoon we did not go out at all because of Maud, and it mattered more because it was the last day before Walter’s term began; after that he would not be free in the afternoons. I don’t suppose this had occurred to Maud; but I don’t think it would have made any difference if it had.

Walter went up to the study while Maud was teaching me; he looked worried and cross, but whether he was cross with her or with me, I did not know. He was cross at tea too, and afterwards, when Maud went away, he did not go with her to the tube, as he used to when his mother came to see us, but he did not come back to me either. He went upstairs again and worked in his study till dinner time.

The next morning, some pheasants came from Yearsly from Cousin John, and I was afraid to have them cooked for dinner; I was afraid they would remind Walter of the day before, and the trouble there had been. I gave one to the charwoman, to take home, for that was the day she came, and I sent the other to the children’s hospital in Chelsea, near Mollie’s flat.

Sarah was annoyed with me that time; she said it was waste to give pheasant to Mrs. Simms, and I told her a lie, and said Walter did not like it; and then I went up to my room and cried.

Maud had made everything horrid. I have never known anyone like Maud for doing that.

XXXV

It was soon after this that I first knew I was going to have a baby. I went to see a doctor called Mrs. Chilcote, whose name I had seen on a brass plate at right angles to our road. She was a nice person; efficient I think, but like Mollie, not like Maud. She was kind to me afterwards very often. Then I went out on the heath and sat down on a seat under a tree; it was a birch tree and the little yellow leaves fluttered down from the tiny branches and I tried to think what it meant. It seemed to me then too wonderful almost to be true. I would have a son, I felt sure of that, and he would be all that I was not, and that Walter was not, nor Hugo; it seems funny now to remember that I thought all that; it did not strike me as improbable at all that my son should be perfect and all I could wish him to be, and I thought of my own relation to him—how I would be a perfect mother to him, as Cousin Delia had been to Guy and Hugo, as she had been even to me; that too did not seem difficult or unlikely to me. I thought:

‘I will never misunderstand him, nor be cross, nor wish him different from what he is.’

Other mothers made those mistakes, I knew, but I would not; and I thought of my son and worshipped him, shutting my eyes on the seat under the birch tree.

When Walter came home and I told him he kissed me and said he was glad, but he did not seem very much interested.

There had been some hitch at his College that afternoon. One of his lectures had been announced at the wrong time and he had not been there; he was thinking about that.

I minded his not caring more, but not badly.

I thought:

‘He will care when it is there.’

And I was so happy myself, so full of happiness, that nothing else could matter very much.

Next day I went down into Oxford Street to shop, and I looked at the people in the bus, and thought:

‘Which of these women have had children? How many of them have known this wonderful thing?’

Most of them probably had known it and yet they looked quite ordinary, quite dull and unexcited, and thinking of dull little things. I felt then that I could never be the same again, that I could not even look the same as I had a few months ago.

I thought:

‘How could anything else count at all if one has a child?’

And I was afraid crossing the streets that I should be run over, afraid when I was in the bus that it would upset, because this wonder was too great and this happiness.

XXXVI

I used to make the coffee for breakfast myself; Walter liked it better when I made it and that pleased me, for I had never made coffee before and I felt proud now, that I should do it well. It had to stand for fifteen minutes after it was made, so I had to be downstairs earlier than Walter; that too was fun, I thought. It gave me a sense of competence to be down in the dining-room with the coffee all ready before he came.

Now, sometimes, I felt very ill in the mornings, and it was an effort to get up. Once when I got downstairs I turned faint and sick and had to sit down in the chair, and Mrs. Simms, the charwoman, came in and brought me a cup of tea. I can’t remember why she came there so early, or why it was she who brought the tea, but it was.

‘Poor dear,’ she said. ‘I know how you feels. Take a cup o’ tea, mum, that’ll do you good.’

I drank the tea and she talked to me and told me how many children she had had; eight, I think it was, and five of them dead and how ill she had been with every one of them; but Simms had been good to her, she said,—Simms was her husband, of course. He would bring her a cup of tea in the mornings before she got up. ‘It’s the putting your feet to the ground that does it. I know that,’ she said.

And I thought:

‘How funny it is that Mrs. Simms should know what I feel like, and Walter doesn’t.’

And I thought:

‘How funny it would be if Walter brought me up cups of tea.’

At home we had had tea in the mornings even when we felt quite well, and I had supposed that we would still here, but Maud had stopped that. She said it was an unnecessary expense.

‘Especially,’ she said, ‘if it is China tea.’

I did not like Indian tea.

Mrs. Simms made the coffee that morning. It was not so good as when I made it; I noticed the difference, but Walter did not. I was sorry he did not; I wondered if he had only said he liked mine best, to please me, if he had really never noticed it different at all.

I felt very ill, those next months, and although I was so happy, I cried quite often at silly things. It was very odd to me to feel like this, for I had never been ill in my life except when I was seven and had measles. Ordinarily I felt so well and full of life. I did not expect to be tired at the end of the day; now I felt very tired, and as though the life had gone out of me.

Maud said:

‘You must not let Helen become invalidish, Walter. She ought to realize that having a child is not an illness at all.’

Walter said:

‘That depends, I suppose, on whether she feels ill.’

Maud said:

‘Not in the least; that is merely subjective; a great many women give way in these things, especially women of Helen’s type. It is most important that she should lead a normal and active life.’

Walter said:

‘My dear Maud, you know nothing about it.’

I was not there, but he told me about it afterwards, and I loved him for being rude to Maud.

She seemed to come and visit us very often, but I suppose it was not very often really.

Mrs. Sebright came every Wednesday to dinner, and every Sunday we went to lunch with Grandmother in Campden Hill Square.

Hugo had gone abroad, he had gone as private secretary or attaché on a Royal Commission in India, and would be away nearly a year. He had gone already before we came back to London, and I had not seen him since the wedding.

It surprised me rather to find how little I missed him; he seemed to belong to another life, a different kind of existence that was quite past now. That had been playing at life; I was living now. Yet sometimes I thought:

‘I should like to tell Hugo about it. I should like to tell him how wonderful this is.’

He would understand, I was sure of that.

Guy came to dinner with us once or twice, but it was not a success. He and Walter did not get on at all, and somehow each showed his worst side to the other; I was sorry about it.

‘We had better leave it alone for the present,’ I thought, ‘later on they will fit in better.’

The Addingtons came oftener to see us. George and Mollie could, I think, get on with anybody. Walter could not dislike them and they quite liked him. I was glad to see them always, but it was different even with them; they seemed much further off than they used to be, like pleasant strangers, outside one’s life, instead of inside. I did not want to talk to Mollie intimately as we used to talk. ‘She is not married,’ I thought. ‘She is not going to have a child. I cannot talk to her about the vital things’; and outside things seemed unimportant to me at this time.

Sophia Lane Watson came to lunch. She talked to Walter about Babylon, and he said she was ‘an intelligent girl,’ and liked her. I wondered how she knew about Babylon; she seemed to know a good deal, but one never did know with Sophia what she knew, and what she didn’t; it was all in streaks.

I wondered if she missed Hugo, and why he had gone away. You could not tell anything from her; she looked just the same as always, white, and non-committal, and self-possessed; at least not exactly self-possessed; you could never be sure with Sophia whether she was hiding her feelings or just not there in her mind at all; sometimes it seemed like that, as though she was mentally and emotionally a long way off, and only her lips speaking to you.

I felt her more interesting now. I did not feel hostile to her, as I had when Hugo was there. I did not think now, somehow, that he would marry her.

Her play was finished now. It was going to be acted. The Drama Society were going to do it. She did not seem excited about it at all. She did not want to talk about it.

I thought:

‘I must see more of Sophia.’

I felt sorry for her somehow, and attracted by her as I had been at school, but I did not see much of her. She came once more to lunch, and I went to tea with her, and then I think she went away for a time; I can’t remember quite, and after that it was the War.

XXXVII

Walter had very few friends. There were elderly ladies, friends of his mother’s who called on us, and two cousins who lived at Southsea, and sometimes came up for the day.

I did not care for the Southsea cousins; they were effusive and rather stupid, and seemed somehow to be pretending, always, to be different from what they were.

Some of the old ladies were rather nice; there was a Miss Mix, who had blue Persian cats. She gave us a kitten. She was very small, much smaller than Mrs. Sebright, and more lively. She had a sense of fun, and seemed to find her life rather funny, though she lived all alone with her cats in a flat near Earl’s Court, and was very poor.

Then there was Mrs. Allsopp, big and fat, and more earnest. She worked for the same church as Mrs. Sebright, and she had a girls’ club connected with the church. She tried to ‘interest’ me in the girls’ club and was ‘very disappointed’ that I would not come and help with it.

And there were two Miss Fergusons who wrote books on Italy and talked about Art, but foolishly, I thought, as if they did not really know what it meant at all.

Miss Mix was much the nicest.

Then there were Walter’s colleagues at the University.

Several of them lived at Hampstead, and their wives came to call on me. They were quite kind and quite friendly, but dull, I thought. They talked about University affairs which I did not know about; not like Maud, but more as dutiful wives, who were bound to be interested in examinations and students because their husbands were.

They asked me how I saw my husband’s pupils, and I said I did not see them.

Walter had never suggested my seeing his pupils. He did not care about them very much I think; he cared far more for the stuff he taught than the people he taught it to; but they said I ought to see them.

Sunday lunch was best, they said, or Sunday tea in the Oxford fashion. I did not even know that it was the Oxford fashion, but I invited some of the students to lunch and tea on Saturday; I rather liked them. They were shy and awkward, not like the young men at Oxford that I had met. I thought they were more interesting than the Oxford young men, but one did not get much further with them, and Walter did not seem very anxious to go on. He saw quite enough of them through the week, he said.

He had two friends at Oxford, ‘dons’ at Oxford, who came sometimes to see us. They had been at our wedding.

They counted as Walter’s friends, those two, and Mr. Furze, but they were much more remote sort of friends than mine had been. When they met they talked about their work and nothing else; it seemed to me that they had nothing else to talk about, but perhaps that was not true.

Mr. Furze was different. Freddy Furze he was, but Walter never called him Freddy. He was more like my own people, at least more nearly like; I felt too that he liked me, and that we could have talked and got to know each other quite well if we had had the chance; but the chance did not quite come, for he lived at Cardiff, and only came to stay with us twice, for about a week.

He had been engaged to a girl who was drowned, Walter told me; Walter had not known the girl, but she was odd and unsatisfactory, he believed, ‘not Furze’s sort, I should think,’ he said; and I had an idea, I don’t know why, that, perhaps, I reminded him of her. Maud would certainly have called me ‘odd and unsatisfactory.’ And he was so kind to me; I wondered how she had been drowned, and all about her, but I could not ask him, and Walter did not know.

I thought we would see more of him; I hoped so; but that first year went past so quickly, and then the War came, and it was too late.

XXXVIII

Walter put away his iron-rimmed spectacles. I had made him promise he would, before we were married. He had rimless pince-nez now, which I liked much better. He had promised me also that he would learn to dance. He had never learned; he had never wanted to learn, he said, but now he did want to, to dance with me. Now for a time I could not dance, and he said he would wait to learn. When the baby was born, he would learn. Then we would both dance.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I shall be a duffer at it; perhaps you will not like to dance with me.’

And I kissed him, and said I would.

I would rather dance with him, I said, than with Hugo; that was what he wanted me to say, I knew, and I believed it when I said it.

In the meantime he tried to teach me Greek. I told him how Hugo had begun once, but we had not got on very far. He said he could teach me better than Hugo.

‘Then we could read things together,’ he said, ‘and you could help me a great deal too, if you would. You could look up things for me in the Museum. You might even learn Syriac, you know; that would be a great help.’

I thought I should like to help him in his work. I tried very hard to learn Greek, but the lessons were more difficult than they had been with Hugo, and Walter got annoyed if I made mistakes. I was afraid of annoying him, and that made me afraid of the lessons.

‘Shall we try the Syriac first?’ I suggested one day, but Walter would not.

‘Greek first,’ he said, ‘was essential’; and so we went on.

In the evenings he took me sometimes to lectures. He belonged to several Archæological Societies who gave lantern lectures in the evening. Walter considered the theatre a luxury. That seemed odd to me at first, but I did not mind, for I was happy, and I wanted to please Walter; I wanted to fit in with his way of life and to leave my own behind me; but one cannot do that, ever, quite successfully, I believe.

XXXIX

Hugo came back from India in June.

He came to see me one morning, soon after he got back.

I was upstairs, tidying a cupboard. I had an overall on, and was dusty. When Louise came to tell me that he was there, I was surprised, for I did not know he had come home. I wondered if I was pleased to see him or not; I did not know; I went downstairs to the dining-room. The drawing-room was being turned out, and we could not go in there.

We sat down on each side of the dining-room table. There were wild roses, in a glass vase on the table, and the water in the vase was cloudy. I had meant to change the water that morning, and had forgotten. I hoped Hugo would not notice the water; I thought he would. I wished we had not to be in the dining-room where the sideboard was, that Hugo did not like. I did not know what to say to Hugo; he seemed so far away; so long ago.

Hugo said:

‘I came back on Tuesday.’

I said:

‘Oh, I did not know you were back.’

I said:

‘Was it interesting in India?’

Hugo said:

‘Yes, it was very interesting. The colours are wonderful there. You can’t imagine what the colours are like.’

I said:

‘Like Holman Hunt, are they?’

He said:

‘Almost; the purples, not the green, so much.’

I said:

‘That must be jolly.’

Hugo said:

‘Yes.’

Then he said:

‘It is funny to visit you like this, married.’

I laughed. I kept laughing a little, foolishly, I felt.

I said:

‘I was married before you went away.’

He said:

‘Yes, but hardly; now you are quite used to it, I suppose?’

I said:

‘Yes.’

He wanted to know if I was happy. I knew he wanted to, and I wanted to tell him that I was, but we seemed too awkward, somehow, to talk in that way, seriously; it was as though we were afraid. He only laughed a little, and said:

‘And how do you like it?’

And I said:

‘Very much, thank you.’

And then we both laughed.

I wanted to tell him about my baby; that I was going to have one very soon now, though I suppose he knew; but I could not speak about that either. It was odd, and painful, the way we could not talk.

I thought:

‘It is because we have not met for so long, and so much has happened in between, at least to me.’

I thought:

‘It will be different when we get used to each other again. We will soon.’

I said:

‘Walter is out. He will be awfully sorry to miss you.’

‘Yes. Oh—I am awfully sorry to miss him. I am going down to Yearsly to-morrow. I suppose you and Walter couldn’t come for the week-end? It would be nice if you could.’

And I said:

‘It would be awfully nice, but I am afraid we can’t. Walter’s mother is coming to supper, and besides he has some work to do in the morning.’

I said it quickly. We could have put off Mrs. Sebright, I knew that really, but I did not want to go, and Walter would not want to go either. We had been twice for week-ends to Yearsly; it did not do, somehow, with Walter. He did not fit in, though Cousin Delia was the same as she had always been.

I think Hugo knew too, for he only said:

‘I was afraid you would not be able to. Well, we will meet again soon. I shall be back in a week or so.’

He stood up to go, and we shook hands.

‘It is nice to see you again,’ he said.

And I said:

‘It was nice of you to come.’

The dining-room was downstairs in the basement. We went up to the front door.

He went down the front steps and the garden path and out of the gate. He turned at the gate and waved his hat, and I waved my hand to him in turn.

Then I went in and shut the door.

XL

Eleanor was born on the 30th of June.

I could see the poplar tree in the garden through the window. The leaves of the poplar fluttered and shimmered, and I watched them from my bed. There have always been trees in my life, always, somehow, at times that were important to me.

And I thought:

‘Other people have been through this before, thousands and millions of people, always, from the beginning of the world. If they could bear it, I can. Cousin Delia,’ I thought, ‘and Grandmother and Mrs. Simms and the women in the bus.’

And later I thought:

‘I can never have any more children! I can never face this again.’

And then they told me it was a girl; and I could not believe it; it seemed such waste; I had wanted a son so much; I had been so sure it was a son; and now it seemed that he had not been real at all; I could not bear it, and I cried.

When I saw her, I did not mind so much, she was just a baby, and I loved babies.

Walter did not mind the baby being a girl. He wanted it to be called Eleanor after his mother. He was worried and irritable at this time; he did not like the monthly nurse, nor the household being upset. The meals were not punctual, he said, specially breakfast, and if breakfast was late, it upset his morning’s work.

He was busy with his book just then; he had made, he thought, a new discovery about his script and that made him irritable.

‘I don’t know what I shall do if that baby cries in the morning,’ he said; ‘it will drive me frantic.’

She had cried in the garden in her pram; she was only a week old.

I asked the nurse to put the pram round the other side of the house. She had put it there, she said, so as not to disturb me.

Walter kept coming to me about things that went wrong.

The laundry had torn his shirt, and he could not find his sleeve-links; it was odd how he seemed to depend on me, as though he were a child almost; I had hardly realized how much before, and I was glad in a way.

‘It shows I am some use to him,’ I thought, ‘in spite of the pheasant and the accounts’; and yet sometimes I was sad about it too.

Mrs. Simms had said to me once:

‘My Simms was a standby to me; you never would believe what a standby ’e was.’

And I wished sometimes that Walter were like Simms.

XLI

People came to see me and Eleanor.

Mrs. Sebright came nearly every day; and Miss Mix and Mrs. Allsopp, and of course Maud. Grandmother came too, and Cousin Delia. I was glad to see them, especially Cousin Delia. I had not seen her for such a long time.

‘Dear,’ she said. ‘How happy you are! Is the world perfect now?’

And I said:

‘Very nearly perfect, Cousin Delia.’

Cousin Delia was lovely with a baby, so quiet and so sure.

I said:

‘Will it seem quite ordinary to me soon, Cousin Delia?’

And she said:

‘I don’t know; to me it never has; to me when Guy and Hugo are there, it is still almost like this. It has never got “ordinary” at all.’

I said:

‘Were you very glad they were sons?’

And she said:

‘Yes; I was glad. I wanted a daughter too, but you were like having a daughter.’

I said:

‘Cousin Delia, I do so wish I had been really your daughter.’

She looked out of the window.

‘I used to think it was better as it was,’ she said, ‘but after all it did not make any difference, did it, in the end?’

I said:

‘It did make a difference, I think.’

She said:

‘Yes; but not in the way I meant. I used to think that you and Hugo would be married one day. It is foolish to make plans.’

I said:

‘I don’t think you made plans in a way that mattered. I don’t think you ever made a mistake.’

She looked round at me, surprised. I was surprised at myself. I had never tried to tell Cousin Delia how I felt about her, and now, suddenly, I wished I could; and I went on:

‘I think you are the most perfect person in the world.’

She said:

‘Dear Heart, thank you: I wish it were true’; and she kissed me.

Then she talked about Yearsly, and Cousin John, and the garden.

Cousin Delia brought roses with her, and all the room was sweet when she had gone. I wished she could have stayed longer. I wished she would come again. I wished I could go back with her to Yearsly. I felt like a child left alone at school.