‘Thank you for your letter. It was kind of you to write. I am glad you liked my poems. I don’t know if they are good. I am living in London now and this is my address.
‘Yours sincerely,
‘Sophia Watson.’
It was like a child’s letter, so stiff and abrupt, and it made me laugh. I invited her to tea at Campden Hill, and Hugo and Mollie to meet her.
She was very like what she had been as a child, but I think less striking. Her hair was up, of course, and did not look so much and so black, and it mattered more now she was grown up that she was so badly dressed.
She was wearing a cotton dress that afternoon—a lilac check that might have been quite nice, but it was all washed out and hung down behind in a tail, as her skirts used to do at school, and she had a green straw hat that did not go with it at all, and grey stockings and brown shoes.
She was very stiff and polite when she came in. Grandmother spoke to her first; she remembered her coming to lunch when we were little, and she had known her father long ago, she said. She smiled at me, but gravely, in a distant sort of way.
She said:
‘It is a long time since we have met, but I should have known you again.’
‘And I you,’ I said. ‘I am sure I should.’