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.
XXXVIII
Walter put away his iron-rimmed spectacles. I had made him promise he would, before we were married. He had rimless pince-nez now, which I liked much better. He had promised me also that he would learn to dance. He had never learned; he had never wanted to learn, he said, but now he did want to, to dance with me. Now for a time I could not dance, and he said he would wait to learn. When the baby was born, he would learn. Then we would both dance.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I shall be a duffer at it; perhaps you will not like to dance with me.’
And I kissed him, and said I would.