‘How can she talk like that to Guy? Doesn’t she know that he
will not dance any more?’
It was time for me to go, and Diana came with me to the top of
the stairs.
‘Awfully good of you to come,’ she said, ‘he wanted to see you. . . .
Come again when you can; he gets awfully blue, you know, at times. . .
I buck him up a bit, chaff him, you know, and that sort of thing,
but it’s jolly rotten really . . . bucked him up no end seeing
you. . . .’
She was kind to me, she meant to be kind. She was explaining
Guy to me; he was hers now, but she would not shut us out.
I wondered if she was kind to Cousin Delia too, and what Cousin
Delia thought of her.
About a fortnight later they were engaged. Her name was Diana
Sotheby; her father was the captain of a battleship; she was
very ‘well connected,’ people told us, and twenty years old.
Cousin Delia said:
‘She is lovely, and I think she is fond of Guy. They will be
married when Guy is better; when he is out of hospital.’
She wrote to Mollie in Salonika, and so did I. I don’t know at
all if Guy wrote too.
Cousin Delia went back to Yearsly, and still the war went on.
We invited Diana to tea. Walter did not like her.
‘A dreadful young woman,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what Guy is
about!’