After that we saw a good deal of Sophia. She liked Mollie, and Mollie liked her. It surprised me rather, but I was glad. They were so unlike each other that they did not clash, and Mollie looked after Sophia, and treated her rather as a child. She was living in rooms alone, in a street off the King’s Road. We thought she had run away from home, but she never told us so.
She did not speak about her home to Mollie or me.
I believe she did to Hugo.
She was writing a play, but she did not speak about that either. But she talked a lot when she got more used to us very much as she used to talk at school, about impersonal things. I felt her inhuman, and too odd; it had not mattered so much when she was a child; but she was attractive still, in her own queer way. You couldn’t help wondering what she was thinking about, and wanting to know. George and Hugo liked talking to her, but not Guy.
He said:
‘She is too clever for me, I can’t live up to it.’
But Guy said that very easily—it was almost a pose in Guy.
Hugo understood her from the first. It was extraordinary how his mind seemed to interpret hers. I don’t know how else to describe it. But it was very often like that, as though she were speaking a foreign language and only Hugo understood. You would not have expected that at first, for they were so different, Hugo so gracious and lovable and gentle, and Sophia so fierce and buttoned up. And Hugo was not tolerant and easy-going like Mollie; he was easily jarred upon and irritated if people and things were ‘Wrong’—but Sophia never jarred upon him, even when she seemed rude and ungracious, and she had a curious influence upon him, in his most special things.
He began to read Russian novels, which he had not liked before, and he went with her to odd meetings of Russian Anarchists, ‘Friends of Freedom’ they were called. She tried at one time to persuade him to go to Russia and help the Revolution. Guy was worried about it, and so was I; we thought Hugo might really go; but George said no, he wouldn’t, and George, of course, was right.
It sometimes surprises me to think how often George was right; instinctively, too, we asked for George’s opinion, and were satisfied by it to a great extent; funny George, with his wide, humorous mouth; dear George, with his steady eyes. I don’t know which side of him was best.