Hugo brought Paulina to Campden Hill that summer. Grandmother did not like her.
‘No, my dear Hugo,’ she said afterwards. ‘Not a suitable young woman, in my opinion. Unintelligent and pretentious. I advise you to leave her alone.’
Hugo blushed and smiled.
‘I am sorry, Aunt Gerry,’ he said. ‘I am sorry you don’t like her.’
‘It may have been a mistake to say what I did,’ she said afterwards to me, ‘but I don’t think so. Épris, I think—distinctly épris—but not inamorato.’
VII
Hugo went abroad that summer with Guy and George. Anthony Cowper joined them in the Tyrol, and they walked down into Italy. They visited Verona and Bologna, and then the Umbrian towns. Hugo became interested in the early Umbrian painters. He came back very full of them. He had a copy of one, a very primitive Byzantine-looking Madonna, pale gold and white and grey, which he hung up in his room. That was the first break in his regime of no pictures at all.
We were all at Yearsly at the end of September. Mollie and I had been in Ireland. We went by ourselves to the West Coast, and bathed and walked, and came back to Yearsly in September.
Guy had to go back to London to his law work soon after, and Hugo went with him for a bit. He saw Paulina in London. Mollie and I knew that; so did Cousin Delia. I wished sometimes I could have talked to him about Paulina quite naturally, as we should have talked once, but things had got different with him and me. We were not close and harmonious as we used to be, and it was that that I minded more than anything else.