I asked Sophia to come to Yearsly at Easter, but she couldn’t. One of her brothers had whooping cough, and she was in quarantine; and I asked her again in the summer, but for some other reason she couldn’t come.
When she did come for a few days the next year, Hugo was disappointed in her. She didn’t talk and seemed out of it, and Guy thought her too ‘intellectual.’ He was in a phase of disliking ‘intellectual women.’
X
Sophia wrote a great deal of poetry. She did not show it to me till I had known her over a year. I don’t know now if it was good; I thought so then. It was odd, passionate stuff, very correct in form. She wrote a good many sonnets, some obscure, rather mystical things about the universe, and some love poems, which surprised me very much. I wanted to show them to Hugo, but she would not let me.
‘I don’t want anyone to see them ever,’ she said. ‘I have only shown them to you—and I shall be sorry about that!’
At the end of her second year at school Sophia got pneumonia. She was very ill indeed, and there were special prayers for her in the school service.
Several girls cried. Ella Price came up to me afterwards, wiping her eyes.
‘I shall never forgive myself,’ she sobbed, ‘never, if anything happens to Sophia.’
‘You were always unkind to her,’ I said.
Then I was sorry for Ella, for I thought how terrible it would be if Sophia did die, and she knew she had been unkind.