‘Is Hugo as bewitched as ever, do you think?’ Mollie asked, and George shrugged his shoulders and looked at me.
‘Helen and I have decided not to worry yet,’ he said.
She gave Hugo a big photograph of herself, with the white furs close up round her face, and a big hat pulled low over her eyes. There was a scrawling signature across it. Hugo kept it in his bedroom on his dressing-table. Guy told Mollie about it, and said:
‘I don’t like it, Mollie. If he had stuck it in his sitting-room I wouldn’t have minded it so much.’
And Mollie said:
‘But Hugo wouldn’t put even his wife out in public—his wife’s photograph, I mean.’
And I remembered how he wouldn’t have Cousin Delia’s photograph out in his study at school. He took it with him every term, and kept it in a box, ‘because it was precious.’
And I thought:
‘Well, he doesn’t put Paulina in a box; that is something.’
He wrote a lot of poetry at this time, and did not show it all to me as he used to. George saw it and said it was good.