‘Do you ever go down to Ellsfield now?’ (The School was called Ellsfield.)
And I said:
‘No, do you?’
And she said:
‘Yes, I do sometimes.’
Then we waited a minute or two, and Guy and the man in the top hat said something to each other, and then we said ‘Good-bye.’
I have never seen her again. Somebody told me she had married a German just before the war, but I didn’t believe it somehow, I don’t know why.
Sophia couldn’t dance at all. It was funny how she couldn’t learn, and I think she was sorry about it. And she couldn’t play the piano. She started to learn Russian about this time. She got a dictionary and grammar, and some Russian books, and she used to try and learn it in odd moments, in bed at night, and at times when she ought to be preparing lessons. She had a passion for Tolstoy at this time, and said she must read him in the original. She did not get time to do much at school, but she learned quite a lot by herself in the holidays.
It seems odd in a way, considering how much we were friends at that time, that we did not keep up with each other more afterwards. It was my fault, I think. I left school two years before she did, and my life was so full of other things and people that she slipped out. We wrote to each other for a time, and she kept on writing for a bit after I had stopped. It was on my mind, I know, that I had not answered her letters. I kept meaning to, and putting it off, and then I wrote and she did not answer, and we let it drop. When we met again, later, it was quite a different thing, just as one meets a stranger.