‘“Not much more to face.” I can’t face life when I am tired.’
It gave me a shiver to hear her.
‘Are you really so unhappy, Sophia?’ I asked.
And she said:
‘Not unhappy, exactly—but I do hate life. I feel it trying to
down me all the time, and sometimes I am afraid that it will
in the end.’
I wondered what Cousin Delia would have made of Sophia. She would
not have felt like that, I thought, if she had been with Cousin
Delia.
Sophia and I remained friends, but as the time went on it was
not equal. She needed me more than I needed her. I think she
wanted some one to admire and love very much, and she had no
one else—and of course I had.
She said to me once:
‘I wonder sometimes what it would be like to be lovely like you.’
And I laughed at her and said:
‘But you don’t like pretty people.’ But I was pleased.
She said quite seriously:
‘I feel differently about it since I have known you, and besides,
you’re more than pretty. You’re _lovely_. It’s like the sun coming
out of clouds when you come into a room!’
I laughed at her, but I liked her saying that, all the same.
Nobody had said things like that to me before.
When I went home the next holidays I wondered if Guy and Hugo
thought me pretty, and Cousin Delia. I wanted to ask them, but
I couldn’t.
What I enjoyed perhaps most at school was the dancing.
We had dancing lessons twice a week and practice dances on Saturday
evenings.
It was like discovering a new world to me, learning to dance.
We only danced with each other, of course, and with whichever
partner was allotted to us, except on Saturdays, when we chose
as we liked. There was one girl called Flora Hilman, whom I always
danced with when I could. She was very tall, with red hair, and
she danced beautifully. We hardly ever spoke to each other in
between, but we danced together whenever we could, and I forgot
everything else when we were dancing. I expect she did too, but
she never said so and I never asked her.
I met her once after leaving school. She was walking in Kensington
Gardens with a man in a top hat, and I was with Guy. We stopped
when we saw each other and looked pleased. I think we both thought
at first that we had lots to say to each other, and then found
there was nothing at all. We said:
‘How funny to meet here.’
But it wasn’t funny really, as we both lived in London.
Then we said:
‘How nice to see you again,’ or something like that.
And she said:
‘Do you ever go down to Ellsfield now?’ (The School was called
Ellsfield.)
And I said:
‘No, do you?’
And she said:
‘Yes, I do sometimes.’
Then we waited a minute or two, and Guy and the man in the top
hat said something to each other, and then we said ‘Good-bye.’
I have never seen her again. Somebody told me she had married
a German just before the war, but I didn’t believe it somehow,
I don’t know why.
Sophia couldn’t dance at all. It was funny how she couldn’t learn,
and I think she was sorry about it. And she couldn’t play the
piano. She started to learn Russian about this time. She got
a dictionary and grammar, and some Russian books, and she used
to try and learn it in odd moments, in bed at night, and at times
when she ought to be preparing lessons. She had a passion for
Tolstoy at this time, and said she must read him in the original.
She did not get time to do much at school, but she learned quite
a lot by herself in the holidays.
It seems odd in a way, considering how much we were friends at
that time, that we did not keep up with each other more afterwards.
It was my fault, I think. I left school two years before she
did, and my life was so full of other things and people that
she slipped out. We wrote to each other for a time, and she kept
on writing for a bit after I had stopped. It was on my mind,
I know, that I had not answered her letters. I kept meaning to,
and putting it off, and then I wrote and she did not answer,
and we let it drop. When we met again, later, it was quite a
different thing, just as one meets a stranger.