PART TWO

PART TWO‘For if they do these things in a green tree,what will they do in the dry?’—Lukexxiii. 31.PART TWOIAND 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.IIMollie 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 theManchester Guardianaloud 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 ‘3d. 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.IIIIt 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.IVIt 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.VGuy 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.VIIt was that Easter that Hugo met Paulina Connell. He saw her first inThe 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, forThe Tempestwas 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 worldThat 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 armyfamily—“ ‘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 donottake 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—distinctlyépris—but notinamorato.’VIIHugo 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.VIIIThat 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,’IXHugo 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.XHugo 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.XIAnd 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.XIIAfter 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’—butSophia 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.XIIII 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 calledThe 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.XIVHugo 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 wasLaneWatson.’‘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 amindlike 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’—andhe paused amoment—‘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.XVOne 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.XVIIt 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.

‘For if they do these things in a green tree,what will they do in the dry?’—Lukexxiii. 31.

‘For if they do these things in a green tree,what will they do in the dry?’—Lukexxiii. 31.

‘For if they do these things in a green tree,what will they do in the dry?’—Lukexxiii. 31.

PART TWO

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.

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 theManchester Guardianaloud 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 ‘3d. 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.

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.

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.

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.

It was that Easter that Hugo met Paulina Connell. He saw her first inThe 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, forThe Tempestwas 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 worldThat has such people in’t!

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

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 armyfamily—“ ‘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 donottake 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—distinctlyépris—but notinamorato.’

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.

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,’

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.

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.

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.

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’—butSophia 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.

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 calledThe 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.

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 wasLaneWatson.’

‘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 amindlike 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’—andhe paused amoment—‘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.

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.

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.

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