There was a knocker on the door of Mollie’s room; it was the first door one came to in their part of the house. I knocked on the door with the knocker and walked in.
They were sitting beside the fire, George in his arm-chair, and Mollie on a cushion on the floor. There was tea on the table, pushed back again against the wall; they had finished tea, and were reading; the grey cat was with them, on the hearth-rug.
It was comfortable, and familiar, and homely. There were blue curtains in this room too, but there were patterns on them, blue and white, and the cushions on the chairs were red; it was a homelier room than Hugo’s, and the chairs came mostly from their old home in Manchester, ordinary sort of chairs, not straight deep shapes like his. There was a Persian carpet that had been in Manchester too, the ordinary blue and red sort of carpet, a pinkish red like the cushions; Hugo said they did not match it quite, and Mollie said she would change them, but she never did; and we got to like the cushions that did not quite match, and we would not have liked to have them changed.
‘We thought you were not coming,’ said Mollie, looking up from her book. George pulled up another chair for me.
I threw the bunch of narcissi into Mollie’s lap:
‘A peace offering,’ I said. ‘I meant to come sooner; I started out quite early after lunch.’
‘You’ve had tea?’ asked Mollie, and I said, yes, had.
George had his pipe; he always had; he took it out of his mouth, and held out his book.
‘Have you read it?’ he asked. ‘Awfully good!’
I looked at the book; it was Aksakov’s Memories of Childhood; I had not read it; I turned over the pages, and read bits of it, here and there. I said: