IX
Hugo and George went in for their examinations. George got a first and Hugo a second.
Walter was in for the same examination; I remember seeing his name in the list.
After that they were in London for the Civil Service Examination.
George did well in that too, but Hugo did not. His name was a long way down in the list, and they said he might not get a post at all. Cousin John was worried about it.
‘I don’t want him to get into some side show,’ he said. ‘He had better give it up and try for something else.’
But Hugo said he would like to wait and see. He furnished the two rooms that Guy had kept for him.
He had his Delphic Charioteer, and his Umbrian Madonna, and the blue curtains and the grey chairs. It was very like his room in Oxford had been. That autumn was a happier time. We were all together again.
George got a post in the Treasury before Christmas, and he set up house with Mollie in Cheyne Walk. They had the two top floors of a house, far along where the river is wide, near the four chimneys. Mollie worked in her laboratory in the mornings, and sometimes after lunch as well. She was writing a thesis on enzymes. It seemed funny always to me that Mollie should do that sort of thing, but she liked it, and it never seemed to use up her soul as I have seen it do since, with other people.
Mollie cared really far more about George and about Guy than she did for all her science, and about me and Hugo too, and she did not pretend not to.
‘I do the biology too,’ she said, ‘because it interests me and I have plenty of time. If I had not plenty of time I should not do it.’
‘The perfect dilettante,’ Walter called her, when I told him that. ‘How much value will her biology be, treated like that?’
And I said:
‘I don’t know about the biology, but she is of value. She is one of the most perfectly balanced people I know.’
And Walter did not deny it, for he liked Mollie.