‘I don’t think people realize how shy she is. They think she
is disagreeable and ungracious sometimes, and they don’t understand
that she is just frightened of them. Do you know, Helen,’ he
looked straight at me, and gave a little laugh, ‘she is even
afraid of you! She admires you awfully, and would like you to
like her, but she thinks you don’t. I told her, of course, that
that was nonsense—that I was sure you liked her, and I told her
that you used to talk a lot about her when you were at school.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Oh, she said that that was quite different. “People change and
outgrow each other,” she said, and then she said that even then
she had cared for you much more than you cared for her. She thinks
you find her dull and dowdy. You do like her, don’t you, Helen?’
He asked it almost wistfully, and suddenly I wanted to cry. If
I could have spoken quite frankly about Sophia, as though she
did not affect me personally at all, it would have been all different;
if I could have asked him straight out what he felt about her;
if we could have talked to each other simply and without reserves,
as we used to once, I think our lives might have been very different
afterwards; but we couldn’t. He was trying to, I think, but I
couldn’t respond. I was fighting against something in myself,
and it was almost as though I was fighting against him. I did
not want him to know my thoughts and my feelings as he used to
know them; and I could not talk to him about Sophia.