XXIX

XXIXCousin Delia came with me to buy sheets.It was June now, and the house was nearly ready. We were to be married on the third of July.She bought a great many sheets, and bath towels, and pillow-cases. We were sitting facing each other, beside the counter, on two high chairs; and then, quite suddenly, when we had nearly finished, I felt that I could not marry Walter; I felt terrified at what I was doing; I felt as though I was caught in a trap.I don’t quite know what did it, but I think it was the sheets. Cousin Delia was feeling them in her fingers, and she told me to feel them. They were very fine and soft, and I liked the feeling of them, and then I thought of them on a bed, and me in bed, and Walter; and I realized that he would sleep with me, and be as close to me as that; I had not, somehow, thought of that before, and I felt it was impossible; I could not go to bed with Walter.I said:‘Cousin Delia, I don’t think I want any sheets.’Cousin Delia looked at me, and I think she knew what I was feeling, for she did not ask me why. She waited a minute or two, and then, when the shopman came back, she said, quite quietly:‘I think we will leave the sheets for to-day. Send me the bath towels and the face towels; that will be enough. We can send them back afterwards, if we want to,’ she said to me, and she took me into the tea-room which was in that shop.We sat in two basket chairs, very low, with cushions in them, in a corner, away from the door. There were little white cloths with green shamrocks round the edge on the tables, and a band was playing, a string band, with women in green uniforms playing. A waitress came round with a big tray of cakes, very gorgeous cakes, that you took with a fork.I kept saying to myself:‘It can’t be true. I can’t be going to marry him, really, in two weeks. This cannot be going to happen to me, this horrible thing!’I wished that the band would stop playing and let me think.I looked at Cousin Delia; she was looking at me. She put out her hand and let it rest on mine.‘Dear Heart,’ she said very gently, ‘it is not too late. Don’t do this, unless you are sure.’I said:‘I want to think. I don’t know what I am doing. I didn’t until just now.’XXXI went to Walter that evening after dinner. I went out alone, and to his house. I asked to see him, and was afraid I should see his mother, but she was upstairs, in the drawing-room, and he came down alone.He came into the dining-room; there was a smell of fish there, but the dinner was cleared away. There was gas alight in the room, over the table; the maid had lit it when she showed me in; it had lit with a loud report, like a gun.He came up to me and took my hands.‘What is it?’ he asked me quickly. ‘What has happened?’I said:‘It is all a mistake. I cannot marry you. I am sorry.’He said:‘Why not?’I said:‘What do you mean?’‘It is all my fault. It is not fair to you either. I don’t love you enough or in the right way, at all.’He said:‘You will love me in time. I know you will. I know you don’t yet; not as I love you.’I said:‘I am afraid not. That is why I have come. I ought not to have let it go on so long. Somehow, I did not understand. I don’t think I shall marry any one, ever at all. I don’t think I ever could!’And then I cried; it was stupid; it was the last moment in the world to cry, but a sob came in my throat, and then another, and I sobbed out loud, and Walter took me in his arms and comforted me.And it was over. I had meant to be cold and firm, and I could not. I felt so frightened; frightened of life, and of myself, and he was very kind. He seemed much older than me, and much wiser; he seemed just then all I wanted him to be.He took me back to Campden Hill Square, and said good-bye to me on the step as he had said it that evening in March, that seemed now, long ago.He said:‘It will be better when we are married. Only two weeks more to wait now.’And I knew then that it was bound to come; that I must go through with it; and I did not know whether it was a mistake or not.XXXIWe were married on the third of July, at St. Mary Abbots Church.Those two weeks of waiting were terrible, but they passed, as everything does, in the end.I thought:‘Twelve days. . .’then: ‘Eleven days. . .’then: ‘Ten. . .’and then: ‘Four days. . .three days. . .two days. . .’I thought:‘It must feel like this if one is diving from a high bridge, from a railway bridge, down into a river.’—I don’t know why I thought of a railway bridge, but Idid—‘It must feel like this, while one is waiting to jump.’And I thought:‘It must feel like this if one is going to be hung; counting the days, and knowing, quite for certain, that something terrific will happen to you in the end.’And then I thought:‘It has happened to other people; to Cousin Delia, and to Grandmother, and to people I pass every day, in the street.’And I thought:‘If they have gone through with it, I can.’Nunky came up with Cousin Delia, to dress me for the wedding. I had a white satin dress, like all brides’ dresses, and a veil that had been Mary Geraldine’s wedding veil, and roses from Yearsly, golden and white.There was a red carpet, and a great many people. Guy and Hugo were there, and Mollie and George, and Anthony Cowper, and Ralph Freeman, and his sister, and Sophia, and the Lacey girls, and Faith Vincent, and vague cousins of mine, and cousins of Walter’s, and Mrs. Sebright, of course, and Maud; and there were two uncles of Walter’s; one was a schoolmaster in the North of England, and one, a solicitor in the West; they came to London on purpose for the wedding, and I liked them, particularly the schoolmaster; and there were people that had to be asked, friends of Grandmother’s, and friends of Mrs. Sebright’s.Cousin John gave me away, and Mr. Furze was the best man, and Mr. Vincent, from Yearsly, came up on purpose to help with the service.My relations sat on one side of the church, and Walter’s on the other; there were more of mine.There was a good deal of music. Guy had chosen a chorale that they sang at the end; but Mrs. Sebright chose the hymns. None of that seemed to matter very much; and afterwards there was a party and a cake, at Campden Hill Square.Walter was dressed in a tail coat; he looked quite different; it made it seem queerer, somehow, and more like a dream.I walked up the aisle of the church with Cousin John while the choir sang ‘Oh Perfect Love, All Human Thought Transcending’; and Walter and Mr. Furze were waiting for us at the top. I had never been to a wedding before, and only twice to this church when the banns were being read and Grandmother said we had better go. It seemed odd to see Mr. Vincent there; he belonged so much to Yearsly, and the little old church with so few people in it, but he smiled at me, and I was glad.Then he said the things about Holy Matrimony, and asked us the questions, and we answered, first Walter and then I, and then there were prayers and hymns, and the vicar of the parish preached a sermon, and then there was the chorale that Guy had chosen—a Bach chorale that he used to sing with the waits sometimes at Christmas; I liked to hear that again, and I was glad that Guy had wanted to choose it.Then we went into the vestry and signed our names, and other people came too, and signed their names. Cousin John and Guy signed, and Walter’s two uncles, and they were all talking.And I thought:‘Now I am married. There is no escape now.’And there seemed to be a great singing noise in the church, though really it was quiet; a sort of noise like the sea on a beach, or wind in trees.Outside the vestry, Hugo was waiting. He said good-bye to me there, for he did not come on to the party. He stopped me in the shadow of the aisle, as I came out with Walter, and said Good-bye.He said:‘Dear, God bless you. Be happy.’And he took my hand; and then he went away; he seemed somehow to drift away, in the shadow, at the side; and we walked down the middle of the church to the door.There was a motor-car outside, and we got into it. We were alone in the motor, driving back to Campden Hill Square, and Walter kissed me, very seriously, and we sat very still. I think he was a little frightened too, now it was done.The drawing-room at Campden Hill Square was full of people, and the dining-room too; there was food in the dining-room, a wedding cake, and ices, and claret cup, and things like a supper at a dance; and every one came up and shook hands with Walter and me, and talked to us; and Walter was introduced to my relations, and I was introduced to his; and there was a great noise of people talking all round, like there is at an evening party; it was like an evening party, though it was only twelve o’clock.Mr. Furze came and spoke to me too.He said:‘It is not very long since our first meeting, in the British Museum. That was a very different scene!’I said:‘Yes; different; but it seems to me a long time ago.’He said:‘Four months, not quite four months, A great deal can happen in four months.’He smiled at me, but he looked sad, I thought, and I wondered why.XXXIIAfter a time they called me away, upstairs, and took off my wedding gown and dressed me in other new clothes, a brown coat and skirt, and a hat with a long feather, and a fur neck thing; all these were new too; I had been to shops with Cousin Delia to buy them.And then we got into the same motor that had brought us from the church. Some one had lent it, but I can’t remember who, and Cousin John shut the door of the motor with a bang, and people shouted and waved to us, and Anthony Cowper threw some rice, and some one else confetti. Some of the confetti got into my umbrella, I don’t know how; it fell out a long time after, on the platform, when I opened the umbrella; that was on the journey back, after our honeymoon was over.We drove to Euston, for we were going up to Carlisle the first night, and then on to the farmhouse on the Roman Wall, where Walter had been staying when we met him there.It was a long journey; too long, perhaps, and people were in the carriage until Crewe.The funny thing is, that I don’t remember that journey distinctly. I remember getting into the train at Euston and getting out at Carlisle, but in between it is a sort of blur; I only remember looking out of the window, at the rails, running along beside us, and thinking:‘I might throw myself out on to those. That would be a way out of it still.’But I knew I would not throw myself out really. That was nearly at the end of the journey, after passing Preston, and the place where the railway runs near to the sea.It was evening when we reached Carlisle, but quite light, for it was summer and the days were longer there than in the South.We got into another motor and drove to the hotel. A room had been engaged for us at that hotel, and the motor had been ordered; everything seemed to happen automatically, as though we were puppets, and somebody else was moving us by strings; at least, I felt like that; I don’t know if Walter did. I suppose it was he who had arranged these things, or he and Grandmother together.People at the hotel came out to meet us; a sort of concierge man in uniform, and the proprietress of the hotel, who was fat and smiling, with black hair. They took us upstairs, and another man came after with the luggage. They took us along a passage, to a big room with a wardrobe in it. Bedrooms do have wardrobes in them as a rule, I know, my own bedroom has, but this wardrobe was different; it was so big that it seemed to dominate the room, it was a sort of triple wardrobe; it had two doors with looking-glasses at each end, and a long plain part in the middle, and the doors came open too easily, so that they swung out, and you saw yourself reflected somewhere, wherever you walked in that room. I did not want to see myself. I did not like that big wardrobe.There was a big bed too; bright red mahogany like the wardrobe, with very thick, shining posts, and red curtains at the back. There were heavy red curtains at the windows, with big mahogany curtain rods and rings, and lace curtains inside. It was a bow window-looking out into the street, but it was not a noisy street.The proprietress said it was her ‘Best bedroom.’‘We keep it for these occasions,’ she said, smiling.She meant to be kind, I could see. She thought how nice it was to be just married; I could see that she thought that. I suppose that she had been married a great many years, longer even, than I have now.She said:‘Dinner will be served whenever you wish; in the dining-room, or a private room if you prefer it?’And I said quickly:‘In the dining-room, please.’I didn’t want to be alone with Walter.Then she went out, and a maid came in with hot water, and I poured it out and washed; and there was the wedding ring on my finger; I could see it through the water and the soapsuds in the basin, when I held my hand right down.Walter was standing behind me; he saw the ring too.He said:‘My hand now,’ and took hold of my wrist, and I laughed, and drew my hand away, and I dried it quickly on the towel, and told him to go downstairs, and I would come.I wanted to brush my hair, and clean my face, and I was shy of Walter being there.I thought:‘How shall I ever take off my clothes, with Walter in the room? Will he stay downstairs? Will he understand that I want him to stay downstairs?’After dinner, we went out for a walk. That was much better than staying indoors. We walked about the streets, and looked at the Castle, and the road to Scotland; and Walter talked about the Romans, and the Picts and the Scots.It did not get dark till nearly ten o’clock, and then we had to go in.As I went upstairs I thought:‘Other people have been through this. Grandmother, and Cousin Delia, and even the proprietress of this hotel. They do not tell us about it, because they can’t. I shall not be able to tell my daughter.’XXXIIINext day, we went on to Howsteads, to the farmhouse; we went early and had lunch at the farm. They were pleasant people there, and they seemed to like Walter. I was glad to be there.We stayed six weeks at that farmhouse. We spent the days out of doors, going long walks over the Fells, with sandwiches and books in a rucksack, and not coming in, very often, till it was dark.Walter had brought Gibbon with him, and he read it aloud to me, lying out on the Fellside, with the sound of plovers calling, and sheep cropping, and sometimes a stream rippling over stones, and we were happy. It was a new world to me, and a new life. It was all quite different from my old life at home, and the country here was not Hugo’s country, and the books we read were not Hugo’s books.And I thought:‘I shall learn to know Walter’s world as well as I knew Hugo’s; his is a bigger, stronger world; it needs more knowing.’I found Gibbon interesting, and Walter explained it well. Once he was annoyed with me because I said thatLove among the Ruinsmade me feel ‘past greatness’ more than Gibbon, but he was not seriously annoyed. I said I would readLove among the Ruinsin exchange for his reading Gibbon, and when I had read it he said that anyhow the last line was sense, and he kissed me, and we did not argue about it any more.When we came back to London, we were almost used to each other.I thought:‘How funny it is that I was so shy of Walter. I am so close to him now. It is wonderful to be so close to anyone.’XXXIVMrs. Sebright had engaged maids for us; a cook and house-parlourmaid. The cook was called Sarah, the house-parlourmaid Louise. She was younger than the cook, and pretty, but Mrs. Sebright said she was not so good a servant.The house was all ready for us. Mrs. Sebright had ordered in food, and she was waiting there to receive us. She was like a little bird, fluttering from room to room; showing us little things she had done; muslin curtains tacked up behind wash-stands, rubber knobs on the floors to prevent doors banging backwards, and so on; she did so hope I would not mind, she said.I did not mind, of course. I thought how nice it all was; I thought:‘How delightful to have a house of one’s own!’I thought how kind Mrs. Sebright was, and how easy it would be to get on with her.I thought:‘I will never let her feel in the way. I will never let her feel that I have taken Walter away from her.’And so we settled down in our own home, and enjoyed it. Walter began work again. His University work did not begin till October, but besides that, he was writing a book on proto-Hittite scripts. He was only at the beginning of the book, the very beginning, and it would take many years to finish, he said, but it would be the only book on that subject, or at least on that aspect of the subject.He had a study upstairs, looking out on the garden behind. He was very pleased with the study; he said it was so quiet, and there was good wall space for books.He would work there all the morning, while I did housekeeping and gardening. I found the housekeeping great fun. I bought cookery books, and made Sarah try new recipes, French and Italian ones that I found in books. She did not mind trying, though they did not always turn out very well. She treated me as though I were a child whom she was humouring; she made me feel always, that she knew much more about it all than I did, but then, that was quite true, and I did not mind.I used to go marketing with a basket; there was a little group of shops, down the hill, two streets away; sometimes I used to go there, and sometimes further afield. It was interesting to me to discover the prices of things, for I had never heard prices discussed, and knew nothing about them. I did not know that chicken cost more than rabbit. At Yearsly, we had both fairly often, and both were supplied at home; it never seemed to make any difference which we had, and at Campden Hill Square, it was much the same; chickens and game and rabbits came from Yearsly, and I never heard Grandmother speak about the price of food.Sometimes now they sent hampers to me, and that was nice, but I enjoyed more to buy my own food. It seems odd now to think that one ever could enjoy it.The first trouble was when Maud came to lunch, on the 1st of October, and I had bought a pheasant. It was expensive; I was surprised to find how expensive it was, but we always had pheasants at Yearsly on the 1st of October; Cousin John always went out to shoot them in the morning, and Guy with him as a rule, and some were sent to Grandmother; these, of course, she did not get till the next day. I would have had some too, if I had waited, for Cousin John sent some to me too that year; I might have known he would, but I did not think of that at all; I only wanted a nice lunch for Maud, and in the shop I saw pheasants, and I remembered it was the first, and I thought:‘That will be just the thing for Maud! I must try and please Maud, for Walter’s sake.’The pheasant cost fifteen shillings, and I bought it, and Maud was not pleased at all. She remarked on it at once.She said:‘Pheasant already! I did not think they were in season yet!’And I said:‘It is the first to-day.’She said:‘The first?’‘The 1st of October. I don’t know how they got them in the shop so early, though.’She said:‘My dear child, you don’t mean to say you bought a pheasant the first day they came in?’And I said:‘Yes; I saw it in the shop, and I remembered it was the first. Guy will have gone down to Yearsly to-day; he always does.’Then Maud asked me what it had cost, and I told her fifteen shillings, and she took in a deep breath, and looked at Walter, and Walter looked uncomfortable. Maud asked him whether he made me a housekeeping allowance and he said he didn’t, and then Maud asked me how much I spent on my housekeeping every week, and I said I did not know.And then Maud said I must keep accounts. She said it was most important.After lunch, she began to show me how to do them. She had an elaborate method, ‘double entry’ she called it, which was supposed to show quite clearly if one had made a mistake. I tried to understand it and to use it, but it was really no use to me, for when the sum came out wrong, which was very often, I could not understand at all how to make it come right. Afterwards, I asked Mollie to show me her way, and that was better. There was much less system in Mollie’s accounts than in Maud’s, and I understood them much better. Now, I have still to do accounts, for Walter likes me to, and in all these years I have grown accustomed to it, but they do not come right very often, even now; I have never learned to be efficient, as Mollie learned with her father; you cannot develop what is not there at all; Walter does not realize that; I do, now.That was an unhappy afternoon. Maud went on and on. She seemed to think that it was an arithmetic lesson, and that I was a stupid child. I always was stupid at arithmetic, I know, but she made it worse, and all the time, I resented her interfering. I felt angry, and rebellious, and not really ashamed of myself, as she seemed to expect me to be.I kept saying to myself:‘I must not quarrel with Walter’s sister. I must be polite to her. I am sure she means to be kind.’But I was not sure, really. I felt always that underneath there was a fight going on, between Maud and me, for Walter. It was not quite a personal fight; she stood for one side of life, one attitude towards life, and I for the opposite, and Walter was wavering between.It was true, of course, that I had been silly to buy the pheasant, I realized that, and it was true, too, that I was stupid over accounts, and did not know how to manage, and organize, and yet I felt underneath that there were some things I knew and Maud did not, some things I could understand, that Maud never would, only my things did not seem to count when Maud was there.She did not go away till after tea.Generally, Walter and I went out in the afternoon. He worked in the morning, and again after tea, but he had kept the afternoon free, so far, and we used to go out and walk on Hampstead Heath, or sometimes have a ride on the top of a bus. Walter had not been much on the tops of buses; he went by Underground because it was quicker, and he was always in a hurry to be where he was going. It had never occurred to him that the actual process of going, should be enjoyed, not, he said, till he met me. Hugo always went on the tops of buses, and I had got the habit, I suppose, from him. He would sometimes spend a whole afternoon on the top of a bus; getting on at random, and going wherever the bus went, to the very end. He used to see things from the tops of buses; he used to watch the people and the streets; different sorts of people, and different sorts of streets, and different sorts of houses. He used to get quite excited sometimes about people he saw like that. Walter never looked at people or things he passed; he could read a book in the Underground, he said, and not on a bus, besides its being quicker.It was a joke between us at first, and so sometimes to please me he would come on a bus, in those first weeks of ours. But this afternoon we did not go out at all because of Maud, and it mattered more because it was the last day before Walter’s term began; after that he would not be free in the afternoons. I don’t suppose this had occurred to Maud; but I don’t think it would have made any difference if it had.Walter went up to the study while Maud was teaching me; he looked worried and cross, but whether he was cross with her or with me, I did not know. He was cross at tea too, and afterwards, when Maud went away, he did not go with her to the tube, as he used to when his mother came to see us, but he did not come back to me either. He went upstairs again and worked in his study till dinner time.The next morning, some pheasants came from Yearsly from Cousin John, and I was afraid to have them cooked for dinner; I was afraid they would remind Walter of the day before, and the trouble there had been. I gave one to the charwoman, to take home, for that was the day she came, and I sent the other to the children’s hospital in Chelsea, near Mollie’s flat.Sarah was annoyed with me that time; she said it was waste to give pheasant to Mrs. Simms, and I told her a lie, and said Walter did not like it; and then I went up to my room and cried.Maud had made everything horrid. I have never known anyone like Maud for doing that.XXXVIt was soon after this that I first knew I was going to have a baby. I went to see a doctor called Mrs. Chilcote, whose name I had seen on a brass plate at right angles to our road. She was a nice person; efficient I think, but like Mollie, not like Maud. She was kind to me afterwards very often. Then I went out on the heath and sat down on a seat under a tree; it was a birch tree and the little yellow leaves fluttered down from the tiny branches and I tried to think what it meant. It seemed to me then too wonderful almost to be true. I would have a son, I felt sure of that, and he would be all that I was not, and that Walter was not, nor Hugo; it seems funny now to remember that I thought all that; it did not strike me as improbable at all that my son should be perfect and all I could wish him to be, and I thought of my own relation to him—how I would be a perfect mother to him, as Cousin Delia had been to Guy and Hugo, as she had been even to me; that too did not seem difficult or unlikely to me. I thought:‘I will never misunderstand him, nor be cross, nor wish him different from what he is.’Other mothers made those mistakes, I knew, but I would not; and I thought of my son and worshipped him, shutting my eyes on the seat under the birch tree.When Walter came home and I told him he kissed me and said he was glad, but he did not seem very much interested.There had been some hitch at his College that afternoon. One of his lectures had been announced at the wrong time and he had not been there; he was thinking about that.I minded his not caring more, but not badly.I thought:‘He will care when it is there.’And I was so happy myself, so full of happiness, that nothing else could matter very much.Next day I went down into Oxford Street to shop, and I looked at the people in the bus, and thought:‘Which of these women have had children? How many of them have known this wonderful thing?’Most of them probably had known it and yet they looked quite ordinary, quite dull and unexcited, and thinking of dull little things. I felt then that I could never be the same again, that I could not even look the same as I had a few months ago.I thought:‘How could anything else count at all if one has a child?’And I was afraid crossing the streets that I should be run over, afraid when I was in the bus that it would upset, because this wonder was too great and this happiness.XXXVII used to make the coffee for breakfast myself; Walter liked it better when I made it and that pleased me, for I had never made coffee before and I felt proud now, that I should do it well. It had to stand for fifteen minutes after it was made, so I had to be downstairs earlier than Walter; that too was fun, I thought. It gave me a sense of competence to be down in the dining-room with the coffee all ready before he came.Now, sometimes, I felt very ill in the mornings, and it was an effort to get up. Once when I got downstairs I turned faint and sick and had to sit down in the chair, and Mrs. Simms, the charwoman, came in and brought me a cup of tea. I can’t remember why she came there so early, or why it was she who brought the tea, but it was.‘Poor dear,’ she said. ‘I know how you feels. Take a cup o’ tea, mum, that’ll do you good.’I drank the tea and she talked to me and told me how many children she had had; eight, I think it was, and five of them dead and how ill she had been with every one of them; but Simms had been good to her, she said,—Simms was her husband, of course. He would bring her a cup of tea in the mornings before she got up. ‘It’s the putting your feet to the ground that does it. I know that,’ she said.And I thought:‘How funny it is that Mrs. Simms should know what I feel like, and Walter doesn’t.’And I thought:‘How funny it would be if Walter brought me up cups of tea.’At home we had had tea in the mornings even when we felt quite well, and I had supposed that we would still here, but Maud had stopped that. She said it was an unnecessary expense.‘Especially,’ she said, ‘if it is China tea.’I did not like Indian tea.Mrs. Simms made the coffee that morning. It was not so good as when I made it; I noticed the difference, but Walter did not. I was sorry he did not; I wondered if he had only said he liked mine best, to please me, if he had really never noticed it different at all.I felt very ill, those next months, and although I was so happy, I cried quite often at silly things. It was very odd to me to feel like this, for I had never been ill in my life except when I was seven and had measles. Ordinarily I felt so well and full of life. I did not expect to be tired at the end of the day; now I felt very tired, and as though the life had gone out of me.Maud said:‘You must not let Helen become invalidish, Walter. She ought to realize that having a child is not an illness at all.’Walter said:‘That depends, I suppose, on whether she feels ill.’Maud said:‘Not in the least; that is merely subjective; a great many women give way in these things, especially women of Helen’s type. It is most important that she should lead a normal and active life.’Walter said:‘My dear Maud, you know nothing about it.’I was not there, but he told me about it afterwards, and I loved him for being rude to Maud.She seemed to come and visit us very often, but I suppose it was not very often really.Mrs. Sebright came every Wednesday to dinner, and every Sunday we went to lunch with Grandmother in Campden Hill Square.Hugo had gone abroad, he had gone as private secretary or attaché on a Royal Commission in India, and would be away nearly a year. He had gone already before we came back to London, and I had not seen him since the wedding.It surprised me rather to find how little I missed him; he seemed to belong to another life, a different kind of existence that was quite past now. That had been playing at life; I was living now. Yet sometimes I thought:‘I should like to tell Hugo about it. I should like to tell him how wonderful this is.’He would understand, I was sure of that.Guy came to dinner with us once or twice, but it was not a success. He and Walter did not get on at all, and somehow each showed his worst side to the other; I was sorry about it.‘We had better leave it alone for the present,’ I thought, ‘later on they will fit in better.’The Addingtons came oftener to see us. George and Mollie could, I think, get on with anybody. Walter could not dislike them and they quite liked him. I was glad to see them always, but it was different even with them; they seemed much further off than they used to be, like pleasant strangers, outside one’s life, instead of inside. I did not want to talk to Mollie intimately as we used to talk. ‘She is not married,’ I thought. ‘She is not going to have a child. I cannot talk to her about the vital things’; and outside things seemed unimportant to me at this time.Sophia Lane Watson came to lunch. She talked to Walter about Babylon, and he said she was ‘an intelligent girl,’ and liked her. I wondered how she knew about Babylon; she seemed to know a good deal, but one never did know with Sophia what she knew, and what she didn’t; it was all in streaks.I wondered if she missed Hugo, and why he had gone away. You could not tell anything from her; she looked just the same as always, white, and non-committal, and self-possessed; at least not exactly self-possessed; you could never be sure with Sophia whether she was hiding her feelings or just not there in her mind at all; sometimes it seemed like that, as though she was mentally and emotionally a long way off, and only her lips speaking to you.I felt her more interesting now. I did not feel hostile to her, as I had when Hugo was there. I did not think now, somehow, that he would marry her.Her play was finished now. It was going to be acted. The Drama Society were going to do it. She did not seem excited about it at all. She did not want to talk about it.I thought:‘I must see more of Sophia.’I felt sorry for her somehow, and attracted by her as I had been at school, but I did not see much of her. She came once more to lunch, and I went to tea with her, and then I think she went away for a time; I can’t remember quite, and after that it was the War.XXXVIIWalter had very few friends. There were elderly ladies, friends of his mother’s who called on us, and two cousins who lived at Southsea, and sometimes came up for the day.I did not care for the Southsea cousins; they were effusive and rather stupid, and seemed somehow to be pretending, always, to be different from what they were.Some of the old ladies were rather nice; there was a Miss Mix, who had blue Persian cats. She gave us a kitten. She was very small, much smaller than Mrs. Sebright, and more lively. She had a sense of fun, and seemed to find her life rather funny, though she lived all alone with her cats in a flat near Earl’s Court, and was very poor.Then there was Mrs. Allsopp, big and fat, and more earnest. She worked for the same church as Mrs. Sebright, and she had a girls’ club connected with the church. She tried to ‘interest’ me in the girls’ club and was ‘very disappointed’ that I would not come and help with it.And there were two Miss Fergusons who wrote books on Italy and talked about Art, but foolishly, I thought, as if they did not really know what it meant at all.Miss Mix was much the nicest.Then there were Walter’s colleagues at the University.Several of them lived at Hampstead, and their wives came to call on me. They were quite kind and quite friendly, but dull, I thought. They talked about University affairs which I did not know about; not like Maud, but more as dutiful wives, who were bound to be interested in examinations and students because their husbands were.They asked me how I saw my husband’s pupils, and I said I did not see them.Walter had never suggested my seeing his pupils. He did not care about them very much I think; he cared far more for the stuff he taught than the people he taught it to; but they said I ought to see them.Sunday lunch was best, they said, or Sunday tea in the Oxford fashion. I did not even know that it was the Oxford fashion, but I invited some of the students to lunch and tea on Saturday; I rather liked them. They were shy and awkward, not like the young men at Oxford that I had met. I thought they were more interesting than the Oxford young men, but one did not get much further with them, and Walter did not seem very anxious to go on. He saw quite enough of them through the week, he said.He had two friends at Oxford, ‘dons’ at Oxford, who came sometimes to see us. They had been at our wedding.They counted as Walter’s friends, those two, and Mr. Furze, but they were much more remote sort of friends than mine had been. When they met they talked about their work and nothing else; it seemed to me that they had nothing else to talk about, but perhaps that was not true.Mr. Furze was different. Freddy Furze he was, but Walter never called him Freddy. He was more like my own people, at least more nearly like; I felt too that he liked me, and that we could have talked and got to know each other quite well if we had had the chance; but the chance did not quite come, for he lived at Cardiff, and only came to stay with us twice, for about a week.He had been engaged to a girl who was drowned, Walter told me; Walter had not known the girl, but she was odd and unsatisfactory, he believed, ‘not Furze’s sort, I should think,’ he said; and I had an idea, I don’t know why, that, perhaps, I reminded him of her. Maud would certainly have called me ‘odd and unsatisfactory.’ And he was so kind to me; I wondered how she had been drowned, and all about her, but I could not ask him, and Walter did not know.I thought we would see more of him; I hoped so; but that first year went past so quickly, and then the War came, and it was too late.XXXVIIIWalter put away his iron-rimmed spectacles. I had made him promise he would, before we were married. He had rimless pince-nez now, which I liked much better. He had promised me also that he would learn to dance. He had never learned; he had never wanted to learn, he said, but now he did want to, to dance with me. Now for a time I could not dance, and he said he would wait to learn. When the baby was born, he would learn. Then we would both dance.‘You know,’ he said, ‘I shall be a duffer at it; perhaps you will not like to dance with me.’And I kissed him, and said I would.I would rather dance with him, I said, than with Hugo; that was what he wanted me to say, I knew, and I believed it when I said it.In the meantime he tried to teach me Greek. I told him how Hugo had begun once, but we had not got on very far. He said he could teach me better than Hugo.‘Then we could read things together,’ he said, ‘and you could help me a great deal too, if you would. You could look up things for me in the Museum. You might even learn Syriac, you know; that would be a great help.’I thought I should like to help him in his work. I tried very hard to learn Greek, but the lessons were more difficult than they had been with Hugo, and Walter got annoyed if I made mistakes. I was afraid of annoying him, and that made me afraid of the lessons.‘Shall we try the Syriac first?’ I suggested one day, but Walter would not.‘Greek first,’ he said, ‘was essential’; and so we went on.In the evenings he took me sometimes to lectures. He belonged to several Archæological Societies who gave lantern lectures in the evening. Walter considered the theatre a luxury. That seemed odd to me at first, but I did not mind, for I was happy, and I wanted to please Walter; I wanted to fit in with his way of life and to leave my own behind me; but one cannot do that, ever, quite successfully, I believe.XXXIXHugo came back from India in June.He came to see me one morning, soon after he got back.I was upstairs, tidying a cupboard. I had an overall on, and was dusty. When Louise came to tell me that he was there, I was surprised, for I did not know he had come home. I wondered if I was pleased to see him or not; I did not know; I went downstairs to the dining-room. The drawing-room was being turned out, and we could not go in there.We sat down on each side of the dining-room table. There were wild roses, in a glass vase on the table, and the water in the vase was cloudy. I had meant to change the water that morning, and had forgotten. I hoped Hugo would not notice the water; I thought he would. I wished we had not to be in the dining-room where the sideboard was, that Hugo did not like. I did not know what to say to Hugo; he seemed so far away; so long ago.Hugo said:‘I came back on Tuesday.’I said:‘Oh, I did not know you were back.’I said:‘Was it interesting in India?’Hugo said:‘Yes, it was very interesting. The colours are wonderful there. You can’t imagine what the colours are like.’I said:‘Like Holman Hunt, are they?’He said:‘Almost; the purples, not the green, so much.’I said:‘That must be jolly.’Hugo said:‘Yes.’Then he said:‘It is funny to visit you like this, married.’I laughed. I kept laughing a little, foolishly, I felt.I said:‘I was married before you went away.’He said:‘Yes, but hardly; now you are quite used to it, I suppose?’I said:‘Yes.’He wanted to know if I was happy. I knew he wanted to, and I wanted to tell him that I was, but we seemed too awkward, somehow, to talk in that way, seriously; it was as though we were afraid. He only laughed a little, and said:‘And how do you like it?’And I said:‘Very much, thank you.’And then we both laughed.I wanted to tell him about my baby; that I was going to have one very soon now, though I suppose he knew; but I could not speak about that either. It was odd, and painful, the way we could not talk.I thought:‘It is because we have not met for so long, and so much has happened in between, at least to me.’I thought:‘It will be different when we get used to each other again. We will soon.’I said:‘Walter is out. He will be awfully sorry to miss you.’‘Yes. Oh—I am awfully sorry to miss him. I am going down to Yearsly to-morrow. I suppose you and Walter couldn’t come for the week-end? It would be nice if you could.’And I said:‘It would be awfully nice, but I am afraid we can’t. Walter’s mother is coming to supper, and besides he has some work to do in the morning.’I said it quickly. We could have put off Mrs. Sebright, I knew that really, but I did not want to go, and Walter would not want to go either. We had been twice for week-ends to Yearsly; it did not do, somehow, with Walter. He did not fit in, though Cousin Delia was the same as she had always been.I think Hugo knew too, for he only said:‘I was afraid you would not be able to. Well, we will meet again soon. I shall be back in a week or so.’He stood up to go, and we shook hands.‘It is nice to see you again,’ he said.And I said:‘It was nice of you to come.’The dining-room was downstairs in the basement. We went up to the front door.He went down the front steps and the garden path and out of the gate. He turned at the gate and waved his hat, and I waved my hand to him in turn.Then I went in and shut the door.XLEleanor was born on the 30th of June.I could see the poplar tree in the garden through the window. The leaves of the poplar fluttered and shimmered, and I watched them from my bed. There have always been trees in my life, always, somehow, at times that were important to me.And I thought:‘Other people have been through this before, thousands and millions of people, always, from the beginning of the world. If they could bear it, I can. Cousin Delia,’ I thought, ‘and Grandmother and Mrs. Simms and the women in the bus.’And later I thought:‘I can never have any more children! I can never face this again.’And then they told me it was a girl; and I could not believe it; it seemed such waste; I had wanted a son so much; I had been so sure it was a son; and now it seemed that he had not been real at all; I could not bear it, and I cried.When I saw her, I did not mind so much, she was just a baby, and I loved babies.Walter did not mind the baby being a girl. He wanted it to be called Eleanor after his mother. He was worried and irritable at this time; he did not like the monthly nurse, nor the household being upset. The meals were not punctual, he said, specially breakfast, and if breakfast was late, it upset his morning’s work.He was busy with his book just then; he had made, he thought, a new discovery about his script and that made him irritable.‘I don’t know what I shall do if that baby cries in the morning,’ he said; ‘it will drive me frantic.’She had cried in the garden in her pram; she was only a week old.I asked the nurse to put the pram round the other side of the house. She had put it there, she said, so as not to disturb me.Walter kept coming to me about things that went wrong.The laundry had torn his shirt, and he could not find his sleeve-links; it was odd how he seemed to depend on me, as though he were a child almost; I had hardly realized how much before, and I was glad in a way.‘It shows I am some use to him,’ I thought, ‘in spite of the pheasant and the accounts’; and yet sometimes I was sad about it too.Mrs. Simms had said to me once:‘My Simms was a standby to me; you never would believe what a standby ’e was.’And I wished sometimes that Walter were like Simms.XLIPeople came to see me and Eleanor.Mrs. Sebright came nearly every day; and Miss Mix and Mrs. Allsopp, and of course Maud. Grandmother came too, and Cousin Delia. I was glad to see them, especially Cousin Delia. I had not seen her for such a long time.‘Dear,’ she said. ‘How happy you are! Is the world perfect now?’And I said:‘Very nearly perfect, Cousin Delia.’Cousin Delia was lovely with a baby, so quiet and so sure.I said:‘Will it seem quite ordinary to me soon, Cousin Delia?’And she said:‘I don’t know; to me it never has; to me when Guy and Hugo are there, it is still almost like this. It has never got “ordinary” at all.’I said:‘Were you very glad they were sons?’And she said:‘Yes; I was glad. I wanted a daughter too, but you were like having a daughter.’I said:‘Cousin Delia, I do so wish I had been really your daughter.’She looked out of the window.‘I used to think it was better as it was,’ she said, ‘but after all it did not make any difference, did it, in the end?’I said:‘It did make a difference, I think.’She said:‘Yes; but not in the way I meant. I used to think that you and Hugo would be married one day. It is foolish to make plans.’I said:‘I don’t think you made plans in a way that mattered. I don’t think you ever made a mistake.’She looked round at me, surprised. I was surprised at myself. I had never tried to tell Cousin Delia how I felt about her, and now, suddenly, I wished I could; and I went on:‘I think you are the most perfect person in the world.’She said:‘Dear Heart, thank you: I wish it were true’; and she kissed me.Then she talked about Yearsly, and Cousin John, and the garden.Cousin Delia brought roses with her, and all the room was sweet when she had gone. I wished she could have stayed longer. I wished she would come again. I wished I could go back with her to Yearsly. I felt like a child left alone at school.

Cousin Delia came with me to buy sheets.

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

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

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

I said:

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

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

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

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

I kept saying to myself:

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

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

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

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

I said:

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

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

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

He came up to me and took my hands.

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

I said:

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

He said:

‘Why not?’

I said:

‘What do you mean?’

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

He said:

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

I said:

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

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

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

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

He said:

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

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

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

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

I thought:

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

I thought:

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

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

And I thought:

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

And then I thought:

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

And I thought:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I thought:

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

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

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

He said:

‘Dear, God bless you. Be happy.’

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

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

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

Mr. Furze came and spoke to me too.

He said:

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

I said:

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

He said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The proprietress said it was her ‘Best bedroom.’

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

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

She said:

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

And I said quickly:

‘In the dining-room, please.’

I didn’t want to be alone with Walter.

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

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

He said:

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

I wanted to brush my hair, and clean my face, and I was shy of Walter being there.

I thought:

‘How shall I ever take off my clothes, with Walter in the room? Will he stay downstairs? Will he understand that I want him to stay downstairs?’

After dinner, we went out for a walk. That was much better than staying indoors. We walked about the streets, and looked at the Castle, and the road to Scotland; and Walter talked about the Romans, and the Picts and the Scots.

It did not get dark till nearly ten o’clock, and then we had to go in.

As I went upstairs I thought:

‘Other people have been through this. Grandmother, and Cousin Delia, and even the proprietress of this hotel. They do not tell us about it, because they can’t. I shall not be able to tell my daughter.’

Next day, we went on to Howsteads, to the farmhouse; we went early and had lunch at the farm. They were pleasant people there, and they seemed to like Walter. I was glad to be there.

We stayed six weeks at that farmhouse. We spent the days out of doors, going long walks over the Fells, with sandwiches and books in a rucksack, and not coming in, very often, till it was dark.

Walter had brought Gibbon with him, and he read it aloud to me, lying out on the Fellside, with the sound of plovers calling, and sheep cropping, and sometimes a stream rippling over stones, and we were happy. It was a new world to me, and a new life. It was all quite different from my old life at home, and the country here was not Hugo’s country, and the books we read were not Hugo’s books.

And I thought:

‘I shall learn to know Walter’s world as well as I knew Hugo’s; his is a bigger, stronger world; it needs more knowing.’

I found Gibbon interesting, and Walter explained it well. Once he was annoyed with me because I said thatLove among the Ruinsmade me feel ‘past greatness’ more than Gibbon, but he was not seriously annoyed. I said I would readLove among the Ruinsin exchange for his reading Gibbon, and when I had read it he said that anyhow the last line was sense, and he kissed me, and we did not argue about it any more.

When we came back to London, we were almost used to each other.

I thought:

‘How funny it is that I was so shy of Walter. I am so close to him now. It is wonderful to be so close to anyone.’

Mrs. Sebright had engaged maids for us; a cook and house-parlourmaid. The cook was called Sarah, the house-parlourmaid Louise. She was younger than the cook, and pretty, but Mrs. Sebright said she was not so good a servant.

The house was all ready for us. Mrs. Sebright had ordered in food, and she was waiting there to receive us. She was like a little bird, fluttering from room to room; showing us little things she had done; muslin curtains tacked up behind wash-stands, rubber knobs on the floors to prevent doors banging backwards, and so on; she did so hope I would not mind, she said.

I did not mind, of course. I thought how nice it all was; I thought:

‘How delightful to have a house of one’s own!’

I thought how kind Mrs. Sebright was, and how easy it would be to get on with her.

I thought:

‘I will never let her feel in the way. I will never let her feel that I have taken Walter away from her.’

And so we settled down in our own home, and enjoyed it. Walter began work again. His University work did not begin till October, but besides that, he was writing a book on proto-Hittite scripts. He was only at the beginning of the book, the very beginning, and it would take many years to finish, he said, but it would be the only book on that subject, or at least on that aspect of the subject.

He had a study upstairs, looking out on the garden behind. He was very pleased with the study; he said it was so quiet, and there was good wall space for books.

He would work there all the morning, while I did housekeeping and gardening. I found the housekeeping great fun. I bought cookery books, and made Sarah try new recipes, French and Italian ones that I found in books. She did not mind trying, though they did not always turn out very well. She treated me as though I were a child whom she was humouring; she made me feel always, that she knew much more about it all than I did, but then, that was quite true, and I did not mind.

I used to go marketing with a basket; there was a little group of shops, down the hill, two streets away; sometimes I used to go there, and sometimes further afield. It was interesting to me to discover the prices of things, for I had never heard prices discussed, and knew nothing about them. I did not know that chicken cost more than rabbit. At Yearsly, we had both fairly often, and both were supplied at home; it never seemed to make any difference which we had, and at Campden Hill Square, it was much the same; chickens and game and rabbits came from Yearsly, and I never heard Grandmother speak about the price of food.

Sometimes now they sent hampers to me, and that was nice, but I enjoyed more to buy my own food. It seems odd now to think that one ever could enjoy it.

The first trouble was when Maud came to lunch, on the 1st of October, and I had bought a pheasant. It was expensive; I was surprised to find how expensive it was, but we always had pheasants at Yearsly on the 1st of October; Cousin John always went out to shoot them in the morning, and Guy with him as a rule, and some were sent to Grandmother; these, of course, she did not get till the next day. I would have had some too, if I had waited, for Cousin John sent some to me too that year; I might have known he would, but I did not think of that at all; I only wanted a nice lunch for Maud, and in the shop I saw pheasants, and I remembered it was the first, and I thought:

‘That will be just the thing for Maud! I must try and please Maud, for Walter’s sake.’

The pheasant cost fifteen shillings, and I bought it, and Maud was not pleased at all. She remarked on it at once.

She said:

‘Pheasant already! I did not think they were in season yet!’

And I said:

‘It is the first to-day.’

She said:

‘The first?’

‘The 1st of October. I don’t know how they got them in the shop so early, though.’

She said:

‘My dear child, you don’t mean to say you bought a pheasant the first day they came in?’

And I said:

‘Yes; I saw it in the shop, and I remembered it was the first. Guy will have gone down to Yearsly to-day; he always does.’

Then Maud asked me what it had cost, and I told her fifteen shillings, and she took in a deep breath, and looked at Walter, and Walter looked uncomfortable. Maud asked him whether he made me a housekeeping allowance and he said he didn’t, and then Maud asked me how much I spent on my housekeeping every week, and I said I did not know.

And then Maud said I must keep accounts. She said it was most important.

After lunch, she began to show me how to do them. She had an elaborate method, ‘double entry’ she called it, which was supposed to show quite clearly if one had made a mistake. I tried to understand it and to use it, but it was really no use to me, for when the sum came out wrong, which was very often, I could not understand at all how to make it come right. Afterwards, I asked Mollie to show me her way, and that was better. There was much less system in Mollie’s accounts than in Maud’s, and I understood them much better. Now, I have still to do accounts, for Walter likes me to, and in all these years I have grown accustomed to it, but they do not come right very often, even now; I have never learned to be efficient, as Mollie learned with her father; you cannot develop what is not there at all; Walter does not realize that; I do, now.

That was an unhappy afternoon. Maud went on and on. She seemed to think that it was an arithmetic lesson, and that I was a stupid child. I always was stupid at arithmetic, I know, but she made it worse, and all the time, I resented her interfering. I felt angry, and rebellious, and not really ashamed of myself, as she seemed to expect me to be.

I kept saying to myself:

‘I must not quarrel with Walter’s sister. I must be polite to her. I am sure she means to be kind.’

But I was not sure, really. I felt always that underneath there was a fight going on, between Maud and me, for Walter. It was not quite a personal fight; she stood for one side of life, one attitude towards life, and I for the opposite, and Walter was wavering between.

It was true, of course, that I had been silly to buy the pheasant, I realized that, and it was true, too, that I was stupid over accounts, and did not know how to manage, and organize, and yet I felt underneath that there were some things I knew and Maud did not, some things I could understand, that Maud never would, only my things did not seem to count when Maud was there.

She did not go away till after tea.

Generally, Walter and I went out in the afternoon. He worked in the morning, and again after tea, but he had kept the afternoon free, so far, and we used to go out and walk on Hampstead Heath, or sometimes have a ride on the top of a bus. Walter had not been much on the tops of buses; he went by Underground because it was quicker, and he was always in a hurry to be where he was going. It had never occurred to him that the actual process of going, should be enjoyed, not, he said, till he met me. Hugo always went on the tops of buses, and I had got the habit, I suppose, from him. He would sometimes spend a whole afternoon on the top of a bus; getting on at random, and going wherever the bus went, to the very end. He used to see things from the tops of buses; he used to watch the people and the streets; different sorts of people, and different sorts of streets, and different sorts of houses. He used to get quite excited sometimes about people he saw like that. Walter never looked at people or things he passed; he could read a book in the Underground, he said, and not on a bus, besides its being quicker.

It was a joke between us at first, and so sometimes to please me he would come on a bus, in those first weeks of ours. But this afternoon we did not go out at all because of Maud, and it mattered more because it was the last day before Walter’s term began; after that he would not be free in the afternoons. I don’t suppose this had occurred to Maud; but I don’t think it would have made any difference if it had.

Walter went up to the study while Maud was teaching me; he looked worried and cross, but whether he was cross with her or with me, I did not know. He was cross at tea too, and afterwards, when Maud went away, he did not go with her to the tube, as he used to when his mother came to see us, but he did not come back to me either. He went upstairs again and worked in his study till dinner time.

The next morning, some pheasants came from Yearsly from Cousin John, and I was afraid to have them cooked for dinner; I was afraid they would remind Walter of the day before, and the trouble there had been. I gave one to the charwoman, to take home, for that was the day she came, and I sent the other to the children’s hospital in Chelsea, near Mollie’s flat.

Sarah was annoyed with me that time; she said it was waste to give pheasant to Mrs. Simms, and I told her a lie, and said Walter did not like it; and then I went up to my room and cried.

Maud had made everything horrid. I have never known anyone like Maud for doing that.

It was soon after this that I first knew I was going to have a baby. I went to see a doctor called Mrs. Chilcote, whose name I had seen on a brass plate at right angles to our road. She was a nice person; efficient I think, but like Mollie, not like Maud. She was kind to me afterwards very often. Then I went out on the heath and sat down on a seat under a tree; it was a birch tree and the little yellow leaves fluttered down from the tiny branches and I tried to think what it meant. It seemed to me then too wonderful almost to be true. I would have a son, I felt sure of that, and he would be all that I was not, and that Walter was not, nor Hugo; it seems funny now to remember that I thought all that; it did not strike me as improbable at all that my son should be perfect and all I could wish him to be, and I thought of my own relation to him—how I would be a perfect mother to him, as Cousin Delia had been to Guy and Hugo, as she had been even to me; that too did not seem difficult or unlikely to me. I thought:

‘I will never misunderstand him, nor be cross, nor wish him different from what he is.’

Other mothers made those mistakes, I knew, but I would not; and I thought of my son and worshipped him, shutting my eyes on the seat under the birch tree.

When Walter came home and I told him he kissed me and said he was glad, but he did not seem very much interested.

There had been some hitch at his College that afternoon. One of his lectures had been announced at the wrong time and he had not been there; he was thinking about that.

I minded his not caring more, but not badly.

I thought:

‘He will care when it is there.’

And I was so happy myself, so full of happiness, that nothing else could matter very much.

Next day I went down into Oxford Street to shop, and I looked at the people in the bus, and thought:

‘Which of these women have had children? How many of them have known this wonderful thing?’

Most of them probably had known it and yet they looked quite ordinary, quite dull and unexcited, and thinking of dull little things. I felt then that I could never be the same again, that I could not even look the same as I had a few months ago.

I thought:

‘How could anything else count at all if one has a child?’

And I was afraid crossing the streets that I should be run over, afraid when I was in the bus that it would upset, because this wonder was too great and this happiness.

I used to make the coffee for breakfast myself; Walter liked it better when I made it and that pleased me, for I had never made coffee before and I felt proud now, that I should do it well. It had to stand for fifteen minutes after it was made, so I had to be downstairs earlier than Walter; that too was fun, I thought. It gave me a sense of competence to be down in the dining-room with the coffee all ready before he came.

Now, sometimes, I felt very ill in the mornings, and it was an effort to get up. Once when I got downstairs I turned faint and sick and had to sit down in the chair, and Mrs. Simms, the charwoman, came in and brought me a cup of tea. I can’t remember why she came there so early, or why it was she who brought the tea, but it was.

‘Poor dear,’ she said. ‘I know how you feels. Take a cup o’ tea, mum, that’ll do you good.’

I drank the tea and she talked to me and told me how many children she had had; eight, I think it was, and five of them dead and how ill she had been with every one of them; but Simms had been good to her, she said,—Simms was her husband, of course. He would bring her a cup of tea in the mornings before she got up. ‘It’s the putting your feet to the ground that does it. I know that,’ she said.

And I thought:

‘How funny it is that Mrs. Simms should know what I feel like, and Walter doesn’t.’

And I thought:

‘How funny it would be if Walter brought me up cups of tea.’

At home we had had tea in the mornings even when we felt quite well, and I had supposed that we would still here, but Maud had stopped that. She said it was an unnecessary expense.

‘Especially,’ she said, ‘if it is China tea.’

I did not like Indian tea.

Mrs. Simms made the coffee that morning. It was not so good as when I made it; I noticed the difference, but Walter did not. I was sorry he did not; I wondered if he had only said he liked mine best, to please me, if he had really never noticed it different at all.

I felt very ill, those next months, and although I was so happy, I cried quite often at silly things. It was very odd to me to feel like this, for I had never been ill in my life except when I was seven and had measles. Ordinarily I felt so well and full of life. I did not expect to be tired at the end of the day; now I felt very tired, and as though the life had gone out of me.

Maud said:

‘You must not let Helen become invalidish, Walter. She ought to realize that having a child is not an illness at all.’

Walter said:

‘That depends, I suppose, on whether she feels ill.’

Maud said:

‘Not in the least; that is merely subjective; a great many women give way in these things, especially women of Helen’s type. It is most important that she should lead a normal and active life.’

Walter said:

‘My dear Maud, you know nothing about it.’

I was not there, but he told me about it afterwards, and I loved him for being rude to Maud.

She seemed to come and visit us very often, but I suppose it was not very often really.

Mrs. Sebright came every Wednesday to dinner, and every Sunday we went to lunch with Grandmother in Campden Hill Square.

Hugo had gone abroad, he had gone as private secretary or attaché on a Royal Commission in India, and would be away nearly a year. He had gone already before we came back to London, and I had not seen him since the wedding.

It surprised me rather to find how little I missed him; he seemed to belong to another life, a different kind of existence that was quite past now. That had been playing at life; I was living now. Yet sometimes I thought:

‘I should like to tell Hugo about it. I should like to tell him how wonderful this is.’

He would understand, I was sure of that.

Guy came to dinner with us once or twice, but it was not a success. He and Walter did not get on at all, and somehow each showed his worst side to the other; I was sorry about it.

‘We had better leave it alone for the present,’ I thought, ‘later on they will fit in better.’

The Addingtons came oftener to see us. George and Mollie could, I think, get on with anybody. Walter could not dislike them and they quite liked him. I was glad to see them always, but it was different even with them; they seemed much further off than they used to be, like pleasant strangers, outside one’s life, instead of inside. I did not want to talk to Mollie intimately as we used to talk. ‘She is not married,’ I thought. ‘She is not going to have a child. I cannot talk to her about the vital things’; and outside things seemed unimportant to me at this time.

Sophia Lane Watson came to lunch. She talked to Walter about Babylon, and he said she was ‘an intelligent girl,’ and liked her. I wondered how she knew about Babylon; she seemed to know a good deal, but one never did know with Sophia what she knew, and what she didn’t; it was all in streaks.

I wondered if she missed Hugo, and why he had gone away. You could not tell anything from her; she looked just the same as always, white, and non-committal, and self-possessed; at least not exactly self-possessed; you could never be sure with Sophia whether she was hiding her feelings or just not there in her mind at all; sometimes it seemed like that, as though she was mentally and emotionally a long way off, and only her lips speaking to you.

I felt her more interesting now. I did not feel hostile to her, as I had when Hugo was there. I did not think now, somehow, that he would marry her.

Her play was finished now. It was going to be acted. The Drama Society were going to do it. She did not seem excited about it at all. She did not want to talk about it.

I thought:

‘I must see more of Sophia.’

I felt sorry for her somehow, and attracted by her as I had been at school, but I did not see much of her. She came once more to lunch, and I went to tea with her, and then I think she went away for a time; I can’t remember quite, and after that it was the War.

Walter had very few friends. There were elderly ladies, friends of his mother’s who called on us, and two cousins who lived at Southsea, and sometimes came up for the day.

I did not care for the Southsea cousins; they were effusive and rather stupid, and seemed somehow to be pretending, always, to be different from what they were.

Some of the old ladies were rather nice; there was a Miss Mix, who had blue Persian cats. She gave us a kitten. She was very small, much smaller than Mrs. Sebright, and more lively. She had a sense of fun, and seemed to find her life rather funny, though she lived all alone with her cats in a flat near Earl’s Court, and was very poor.

Then there was Mrs. Allsopp, big and fat, and more earnest. She worked for the same church as Mrs. Sebright, and she had a girls’ club connected with the church. She tried to ‘interest’ me in the girls’ club and was ‘very disappointed’ that I would not come and help with it.

And there were two Miss Fergusons who wrote books on Italy and talked about Art, but foolishly, I thought, as if they did not really know what it meant at all.

Miss Mix was much the nicest.

Then there were Walter’s colleagues at the University.

Several of them lived at Hampstead, and their wives came to call on me. They were quite kind and quite friendly, but dull, I thought. They talked about University affairs which I did not know about; not like Maud, but more as dutiful wives, who were bound to be interested in examinations and students because their husbands were.

They asked me how I saw my husband’s pupils, and I said I did not see them.

Walter had never suggested my seeing his pupils. He did not care about them very much I think; he cared far more for the stuff he taught than the people he taught it to; but they said I ought to see them.

Sunday lunch was best, they said, or Sunday tea in the Oxford fashion. I did not even know that it was the Oxford fashion, but I invited some of the students to lunch and tea on Saturday; I rather liked them. They were shy and awkward, not like the young men at Oxford that I had met. I thought they were more interesting than the Oxford young men, but one did not get much further with them, and Walter did not seem very anxious to go on. He saw quite enough of them through the week, he said.

He had two friends at Oxford, ‘dons’ at Oxford, who came sometimes to see us. They had been at our wedding.

They counted as Walter’s friends, those two, and Mr. Furze, but they were much more remote sort of friends than mine had been. When they met they talked about their work and nothing else; it seemed to me that they had nothing else to talk about, but perhaps that was not true.

Mr. Furze was different. Freddy Furze he was, but Walter never called him Freddy. He was more like my own people, at least more nearly like; I felt too that he liked me, and that we could have talked and got to know each other quite well if we had had the chance; but the chance did not quite come, for he lived at Cardiff, and only came to stay with us twice, for about a week.

He had been engaged to a girl who was drowned, Walter told me; Walter had not known the girl, but she was odd and unsatisfactory, he believed, ‘not Furze’s sort, I should think,’ he said; and I had an idea, I don’t know why, that, perhaps, I reminded him of her. Maud would certainly have called me ‘odd and unsatisfactory.’ And he was so kind to me; I wondered how she had been drowned, and all about her, but I could not ask him, and Walter did not know.

I thought we would see more of him; I hoped so; but that first year went past so quickly, and then the War came, and it was too late.

Walter put away his iron-rimmed spectacles. I had made him promise he would, before we were married. He had rimless pince-nez now, which I liked much better. He had promised me also that he would learn to dance. He had never learned; he had never wanted to learn, he said, but now he did want to, to dance with me. Now for a time I could not dance, and he said he would wait to learn. When the baby was born, he would learn. Then we would both dance.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I shall be a duffer at it; perhaps you will not like to dance with me.’

And I kissed him, and said I would.

I would rather dance with him, I said, than with Hugo; that was what he wanted me to say, I knew, and I believed it when I said it.

In the meantime he tried to teach me Greek. I told him how Hugo had begun once, but we had not got on very far. He said he could teach me better than Hugo.

‘Then we could read things together,’ he said, ‘and you could help me a great deal too, if you would. You could look up things for me in the Museum. You might even learn Syriac, you know; that would be a great help.’

I thought I should like to help him in his work. I tried very hard to learn Greek, but the lessons were more difficult than they had been with Hugo, and Walter got annoyed if I made mistakes. I was afraid of annoying him, and that made me afraid of the lessons.

‘Shall we try the Syriac first?’ I suggested one day, but Walter would not.

‘Greek first,’ he said, ‘was essential’; and so we went on.

In the evenings he took me sometimes to lectures. He belonged to several Archæological Societies who gave lantern lectures in the evening. Walter considered the theatre a luxury. That seemed odd to me at first, but I did not mind, for I was happy, and I wanted to please Walter; I wanted to fit in with his way of life and to leave my own behind me; but one cannot do that, ever, quite successfully, I believe.

Hugo came back from India in June.

He came to see me one morning, soon after he got back.

I was upstairs, tidying a cupboard. I had an overall on, and was dusty. When Louise came to tell me that he was there, I was surprised, for I did not know he had come home. I wondered if I was pleased to see him or not; I did not know; I went downstairs to the dining-room. The drawing-room was being turned out, and we could not go in there.

We sat down on each side of the dining-room table. There were wild roses, in a glass vase on the table, and the water in the vase was cloudy. I had meant to change the water that morning, and had forgotten. I hoped Hugo would not notice the water; I thought he would. I wished we had not to be in the dining-room where the sideboard was, that Hugo did not like. I did not know what to say to Hugo; he seemed so far away; so long ago.

Hugo said:

‘I came back on Tuesday.’

I said:

‘Oh, I did not know you were back.’

I said:

‘Was it interesting in India?’

Hugo said:

‘Yes, it was very interesting. The colours are wonderful there. You can’t imagine what the colours are like.’

I said:

‘Like Holman Hunt, are they?’

He said:

‘Almost; the purples, not the green, so much.’

I said:

‘That must be jolly.’

Hugo said:

‘Yes.’

Then he said:

‘It is funny to visit you like this, married.’

I laughed. I kept laughing a little, foolishly, I felt.

I said:

‘I was married before you went away.’

He said:

‘Yes, but hardly; now you are quite used to it, I suppose?’

I said:

‘Yes.’

He wanted to know if I was happy. I knew he wanted to, and I wanted to tell him that I was, but we seemed too awkward, somehow, to talk in that way, seriously; it was as though we were afraid. He only laughed a little, and said:

‘And how do you like it?’

And I said:

‘Very much, thank you.’

And then we both laughed.

I wanted to tell him about my baby; that I was going to have one very soon now, though I suppose he knew; but I could not speak about that either. It was odd, and painful, the way we could not talk.

I thought:

‘It is because we have not met for so long, and so much has happened in between, at least to me.’

I thought:

‘It will be different when we get used to each other again. We will soon.’

I said:

‘Walter is out. He will be awfully sorry to miss you.’

‘Yes. Oh—I am awfully sorry to miss him. I am going down to Yearsly to-morrow. I suppose you and Walter couldn’t come for the week-end? It would be nice if you could.’

And I said:

‘It would be awfully nice, but I am afraid we can’t. Walter’s mother is coming to supper, and besides he has some work to do in the morning.’

I said it quickly. We could have put off Mrs. Sebright, I knew that really, but I did not want to go, and Walter would not want to go either. We had been twice for week-ends to Yearsly; it did not do, somehow, with Walter. He did not fit in, though Cousin Delia was the same as she had always been.

I think Hugo knew too, for he only said:

‘I was afraid you would not be able to. Well, we will meet again soon. I shall be back in a week or so.’

He stood up to go, and we shook hands.

‘It is nice to see you again,’ he said.

And I said:

‘It was nice of you to come.’

The dining-room was downstairs in the basement. We went up to the front door.

He went down the front steps and the garden path and out of the gate. He turned at the gate and waved his hat, and I waved my hand to him in turn.

Then I went in and shut the door.

Eleanor was born on the 30th of June.

I could see the poplar tree in the garden through the window. The leaves of the poplar fluttered and shimmered, and I watched them from my bed. There have always been trees in my life, always, somehow, at times that were important to me.

And I thought:

‘Other people have been through this before, thousands and millions of people, always, from the beginning of the world. If they could bear it, I can. Cousin Delia,’ I thought, ‘and Grandmother and Mrs. Simms and the women in the bus.’

And later I thought:

‘I can never have any more children! I can never face this again.’

And then they told me it was a girl; and I could not believe it; it seemed such waste; I had wanted a son so much; I had been so sure it was a son; and now it seemed that he had not been real at all; I could not bear it, and I cried.

When I saw her, I did not mind so much, she was just a baby, and I loved babies.

Walter did not mind the baby being a girl. He wanted it to be called Eleanor after his mother. He was worried and irritable at this time; he did not like the monthly nurse, nor the household being upset. The meals were not punctual, he said, specially breakfast, and if breakfast was late, it upset his morning’s work.

He was busy with his book just then; he had made, he thought, a new discovery about his script and that made him irritable.

‘I don’t know what I shall do if that baby cries in the morning,’ he said; ‘it will drive me frantic.’

She had cried in the garden in her pram; she was only a week old.

I asked the nurse to put the pram round the other side of the house. She had put it there, she said, so as not to disturb me.

Walter kept coming to me about things that went wrong.

The laundry had torn his shirt, and he could not find his sleeve-links; it was odd how he seemed to depend on me, as though he were a child almost; I had hardly realized how much before, and I was glad in a way.

‘It shows I am some use to him,’ I thought, ‘in spite of the pheasant and the accounts’; and yet sometimes I was sad about it too.

Mrs. Simms had said to me once:

‘My Simms was a standby to me; you never would believe what a standby ’e was.’

And I wished sometimes that Walter were like Simms.

People came to see me and Eleanor.

Mrs. Sebright came nearly every day; and Miss Mix and Mrs. Allsopp, and of course Maud. Grandmother came too, and Cousin Delia. I was glad to see them, especially Cousin Delia. I had not seen her for such a long time.

‘Dear,’ she said. ‘How happy you are! Is the world perfect now?’

And I said:

‘Very nearly perfect, Cousin Delia.’

Cousin Delia was lovely with a baby, so quiet and so sure.

I said:

‘Will it seem quite ordinary to me soon, Cousin Delia?’

And she said:

‘I don’t know; to me it never has; to me when Guy and Hugo are there, it is still almost like this. It has never got “ordinary” at all.’

I said:

‘Were you very glad they were sons?’

And she said:

‘Yes; I was glad. I wanted a daughter too, but you were like having a daughter.’

I said:

‘Cousin Delia, I do so wish I had been really your daughter.’

She looked out of the window.

‘I used to think it was better as it was,’ she said, ‘but after all it did not make any difference, did it, in the end?’

I said:

‘It did make a difference, I think.’

She said:

‘Yes; but not in the way I meant. I used to think that you and Hugo would be married one day. It is foolish to make plans.’

I said:

‘I don’t think you made plans in a way that mattered. I don’t think you ever made a mistake.’

She looked round at me, surprised. I was surprised at myself. I had never tried to tell Cousin Delia how I felt about her, and now, suddenly, I wished I could; and I went on:

‘I think you are the most perfect person in the world.’

She said:

‘Dear Heart, thank you: I wish it were true’; and she kissed me.

Then she talked about Yearsly, and Cousin John, and the garden.

Cousin Delia brought roses with her, and all the room was sweet when she had gone. I wished she could have stayed longer. I wished she would come again. I wished I could go back with her to Yearsly. I felt like a child left alone at school.

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