My grandmother came to Yearsly with me, and part of the time the Lacey girls were there, but the place seemed empty and all wrong without Guy and Hugo.
They came back in September only a week before I went back to school, and two other friends of Guy’s came too.
In October Hugo went up to Oxford with Guy, but I did not see them there till the next spring.
PART TWO
‘For if they do these things in a green tree,
what will they do in the dry?’
—Luke xxiii. 31.
PART TWO
I
AND now the Addingtons came into our lives. For the next few years they were part of all we did and thought. They were part of our life. It used to seem odd, during those next years, to realize we had known them so short a time. As soon as we knew them it seemed as though we had always been friends. I think that the Addingtons were about the best people I have known. They were so dear, too, and so true.
Of most people, even people I love very much, I feel that they might in certain circumstances act wrongly or from some bad motive; but with George and Mollie one felt from the beginning absolutely sure that they never would. There was a sort of solid nobility in them both that nothing could shake or alter. They were unlike each other in a great many ways. George was much cleverer than Mollie, much more amusing and more whimsical, but in this essential quality they were the same, and it was this, I think, that attracted Hugo so strongly to them first, and then Guy, and then me. I suppose we three in our different ways all rather lacked this quality. But Guy lacked it less than Hugo and me.
George had been at Winchester with Guy and Hugo, but they had hardly known him there, for he was a scholar, and they were not. It was when they met again at New College that they became friends, chiefly Hugo and George at first, and then Guy too; and Mollie was at college too in Oxford at that time.