And he had gone back to his own room and worked at Demosthenes all the morning. By lunch-time he had almost finished what he was doing. He had lunch in his own room, and then went on with the work. He heard the clock strike two, and remembered George, but he said to himself: ‘I needn’t decide yet. I don’t think I will go.’
Then he got intent on his work, and really forgot when it was half-past. When he came to a pause it was nearly three; he looked at his watch and remembered George again.
‘The Lauriers and their cousin and my sister,’ George had said.
Walter was shy of girls, especially the kind of girls he imagined us to be, and he had even then a sort of prejudice against Guy and Hugo.
He says that he was irritated by their air of superiority, when he knew they had nothing to be superior about. But I believe he was attracted by them too, and annoyed with himself for being attracted. He says that he decided first that it was too late to go, and then thought, ‘If I don’t go, it will be because I am afraid of them, and afraid of going at the wrong time’; and that decided him the other way. As soon as he decided to go he became in a great hurry, and ran all the way down New College Lane. He said he felt a fool when he tumbled on the stairs, and he said he knew we thought him funny. That made me ashamed, for I had not supposed he would see what we thought at all. That was always happening, though, with Walter. He seemed so stupid at times, as though he didn’t understand anything one was feeling or thinking at all, and then long afterwards one found out that he had understood quite a lot.
He said that he looked at me as he came into the room, and that he thought me beautiful, and different from anything he had ever seen before. Of course poor Walter had not seen many women before besides his mother and Maud, and of course I was quite different from them—and that then he wished that he had not come. He said that he felt suddenly that his clothes were all wrong, and he remembered that he had not brushed his hair before he came out, and that for the first time in his life he wished he was different from what he was, handsomer and smarter, and more like what he despised as a rule.
‘I blessed George Addington,’ he said afterwards, when he was talking to me about that afternoon. ‘He was the only person who made me feel at ease. I forget now what he said—something quite ordinary—but I didn’t feel he was sizing me up and not quite liking me, as I did with the rest of you.’
He said that he went a long way with me in a canoe and that we talked about New College and the windows in the Chapel, and that he was impressed by my knowledge of stained glass.
That too is funny, for I never knew much about glass, nor was much interested in it, and I don’t remember talking about it at all.
He says that I was kind to him, not snubby or supercilious as he had expected. Why he should have expected that I can’t understand. Neither Guy nor Hugo was snubby, and certainly not George.