‘I hate pretty people—my sister is pretty.’
And another time when I had been speaking about Yearsly, she looked at me seriously with her big green eyes and said:
‘It is curious how you love Guy and Hugo. I should have thought you would dislike them, being brought up with them like that.’
These were the sort of things that shocked me at first, but not when I knew her better. I realized then that she did not mean them in a shocking way.
I thought how differently I should feel if I had not lived at Yearsly, if, for instance, my own mother had brought me up, and I felt very sorry for Sophia, and that made me like her more.
She was in a higher form than me, although she was younger, and I did not see much of her during the day, but in our second term we were put to sleep together, just us two in the room, and we used to talk in the mornings and evenings, and on Sundays, when we went for walks. Sophia had been ill and she was not allowed to play games. She always went for walks, and I did so too when I could, and walked with her.
It was the end of that second term that she made her sensation.
There were always recitations at the end of that term, and a prize for the best recitation. That time there was a choice of three pieces, all Shakespeare, and one was Lady Macbeth’s speech.
I was considered good at this, and there were two or three others who were good. Nobody expected anything of Sophia—she was so unemotional and stiff as a rule.
And then suddenly she took us all by storm.