When Guy and Hugo came to meals, or George and Mollie, she talked to them quite frankly and simply as though they were contemporaries of her own, but afterwards, almost always, she would go up to her own sitting-room, she had a big sitting-room of her own at the top of the house, and leave them downstairs with me. There was no fuss about it. We never felt hurt that she did not want us, nor yet that she was hurt at our not wanting her. There was no beating about the bush with Grandmother.
‘Aunt Gerry is wonderful,’ Guy once said. ‘It is like talking to a man when you talk to her, not to an old lady.’
She was fonder of Guy than of Hugo. I sometimes thought her a little impatient with Hugo, but I think she loved him too in her own undemonstrative way. George and Mollie pleased her very much.
‘They are refreshing,’ she said the first time they had come to the house. ‘They do me good’; and after a pause while she was polishing her spectacles she put them on, and added, looking at me: ‘I did not know Hugo had so much good sense.’
She meant, I knew, as to choose such sensible friends, and also a little to tease me, for she thought me too uncritical of Hugo. So I only laughed and said: ‘Perhaps it was they who had the good sense,’ and she laughed too and said: ‘Perhaps it was.’
I had defended Hugo at first when she criticized him. That had amused her, and she did it more, but she never was unkind about him. She never said things that really hurt either him or me.
VI
It was that Easter that Hugo met Paulina Connell. He saw her first in The Tempest. She was playing Miranda, and she did it very well.
We were all there. Guy and George and Mollie and I. We all enjoyed the performance, and we all thought Miranda charming, but Hugo was bowled over.
‘Isn’t it lovely? isn’t it lovely?’ he kept saying. ‘I think that Miranda is quite perfect. She is just what Miranda should be.’