As I went upstairs I thought:
‘Other people have been through this. Grandmother, and Cousin Delia, and even the proprietress of this hotel. They do not tell us about it, because they can’t. I shall not be able to tell my daughter.’
XXXIII
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.