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.