I lived in term time with my grandmother again, and went to classes and lectures at Bedford College. I learned Italian and went on with my music, and Mollie came very often to Campden Hill, and I went to her in Chelsea; sometimes I would meet her at the laboratory where she worked, and we had lunch in an A.B.C.
Often, too, we went to Oxford and saw Guy and Hugo and George. We stayed in lodgings in St. John’s Street, generally from Friday till Monday, and we would go long walks, all together, over Shotover sometimes and a long way on towards Otmoor, or sometimes along the Upper River past Godstow and Bablockhythe. There was a ferry there that we used to cross. It was in autumn or winter, that walk. I remember it chiefly with a red frosty sun. And in the summer we would go up the Cherwell in canoes; right up beyond the branching of the rivers, to a place where the willows met overhead and their shadows met together in the water.
III
It was on one of these picnics that I met Walter. George had invited him; it was generally George that brought new people in. He was more interested in different sorts of people than Guy and Hugo.
We were waiting in Guy’s room to start for the picnic. He had rooms in Broad Street then, looking on to the Sheldonian Theatre. George came in and said:
‘I’ve invited Sebright to come too. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Well, I suppose not,’ said Guy. ‘He is a dull dog.’
‘Who is Sebright?’ asked Mollie.
‘Oh, he is the star of New College,’ said Guy. ‘He’s got all the pots this year—Ireland, Hertford, Gaisford. I don’t know what all—and looks like a mouse.’
‘No, not a mouse,’ corrected George, ‘more buttoned up than a mouse.’