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 that _Love among the Ruins_
made me feel ‘past greatness’ more than Gibbon, but he was not
seriously annoyed. I said I would read _Love among the Ruins_ in
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.