I went for a walk in Kensington Gardens and tried to think it out. The gardeners were sweeping up the leaves—yellow leaves of lime trees and planes.
‘It is my own fault,’ I kept saying to myself. ‘I have spoilt it all myself.’
My relation to Hugo had been perfect once—a beautiful, almost a holy thing. He had been my brother and something more, for there was a freedom, an element of choice, which would not have been there if we were really brother and sister; and now it was as though I had made claims upon him that I had hardly realized myself. I felt hurt by him and injured, though he had done me no injury. ‘It is not his fault,’ I thought, ‘that he wants other people besides me, and I want only him. That is quite natural. It is only my feeling like this that is wrong’; and I felt ashamed and unhappy.
XIV
Hugo asked me to be kind to Sophia. It had not occurred to me that I was not.
He said:
‘She likes you so much, and you used to like her.’
He had come to dinner at Campden Hill. I could see that he was excited and happy, he talked so much at dinner, and his eyes shone. Grandmother noticed it too, for I saw her watching him, and she asked him, when the coffee came, what he had been doing that day.
He said:
‘I went for a walk with Sophia Watson in Richmond Park.’