I suppose henceforward _I_ had better call her Helen. And, as a matter
of fact, the first time I saw her after my return she asked me to do so.
"Mrs. Severn," she said, sounded dreadfully stiff between friends.
Perhaps it did, but I found it hard to break the habit.
I had met her one afternoon on the pavement outside University College.
She asked me if I were just going up to see Terry, and I replied, with
perhaps an implied rebuke: "Certainly not. Have you just been to see
him?"
"Why 'certainly not'?"
"Because he hates to be interrupted in his working hours. But I suppose
you _have_ been to see him?"
"Yes," she answered, smiling. "But not in the way you think I have. I've
been to one of his lectures, that's all."
And then she told me details. She laughed over it in a way that seemed
to betray an inward nervousness. She had begun a course in bacteriology.
It was interesting. One ought to have _something_ serious in one's life,
oughtn't one?
"Terry says so, I daresay," I replied.
"_You_ call him Terry?"
"I do. Have you any objection?"
She laughed again. "Of course not. I think the less formal we all are the
better. That's what's the trouble with him--he's _too_ formal--he
doesn't seem to believe in any pleasure, or amusement, or--or----" She
couldn't, apparently, think of any third commodity that he didn't
believe in. "But I think I'm managing to convert him gradually," she
added.
"And he's managing to convert you a little at the same time, eh?"
She laughed again in the same curious, muffled-up manner. No, she said;
Terry was _not_ converting her. Not really. He was only just showing her
things that she had already felt or guessed. Bacteriology was a symbol
rather than the thing itself.
I asked her whose idea it had been first of all, and she answered: "Not
_his_, you can be sure." He, in fact, had been anything but keen about
it. Perhaps he thought that her presence would make him nervous during
his lectures. (Again the curious laugh.) But of course he hadn't any
power to prevent her from paying the fee and joining.
She went on: "It's rather amusing--the way he treats me. Privately, of
course, we're friends. But professionally, as a member of his class, I'm
nothing. Not a word or a smile. When he's finished lecturing he picks up
his papers and dashes out of the room as if he's afraid somebody might
follow him."
"Perhaps he is."
She admitted the possibility. "But I have such an absurd ambition to
make him take _some_ notice of me. _Isn't_ it absurd? I feel it would be
good for him to be made to break all his neat little rules.... Anyhow,
don't forget that you're both coming to dinner on the twelfth. And also,
by the way...." And then came her request that I should join in the
general informality by calling her Helen. "Or Helène," she added, "if
you like to be really correct."