He was afraid I should be annoyed at going in the boat with him. I don’t suppose I minded which boat it was. We were all quite near together as far as I remember, and I was very happy on those picnics.
He said that he felt envious of Guy and Hugo because they were often with me, and he felt they were not good enough for me: ‘Just the idle commoner type,’ he called them—and that I was better than that. He knew even at the time he told me that he had been wrong about them; he got to understand something of them both in the end, but never very much. He was never fair to them, nor they to him, but they realized it more than he did.
At that time, too, he thought me much cleverer than I am.
Walter could not care for anyone whom he did not think clever, and he did care for me. He has told me how he went back to his rooms after that picnic and stood by the window in the dark, and said to himself over and over again:
‘I am in love—I am in love with Helen Woodruffe,’ and that he could not sleep that night, but walked about his room till early morning. It seems curious to me when he was feeling so much I should have felt so little; that I should have had no notion of what was going on in his mind.
I suppose it was like Hugo. I had just not been thinking about him.
V
Guy went down from Oxford at the end of that term. He took a First Class in History, and then started reading for the Bar.
It always annoyed Walter that Guy had got a first, for Walter felt these distinctions very important. He used to talk of people as first-class intellects or ‘the sort of man who might get a Second in History,’ and I know he considered Guy should belong to the second group. He said once that he didn’t think much of the Oxford History School, because such obviously second-rate people could get firsts in it, and I thought he was thinking of Guy.
I never could see that it mattered very much, or meant very much. George got a first too in his examination, ‘Greats,’ which was the same that Walter did himself, and Hugo only a second. Walter used to say of Hugo later on that he was good material wasted; that he might have been the scholar type if he had ever been taught to work.