‘No, I was disappointed then that neither you nor Guy seemed to care for her much.’
‘Guy doesn’t appreciate her now, and I can understand that. She is not at her best with him. She is shy, and he doesn’t get any further.’
I said nothing, and he went on.
‘I don’t think people realize how shy she is. They think she is disagreeable and ungracious sometimes, and they don’t understand that she is just frightened of them. Do you know, Helen,’ he looked straight at me, and gave a little laugh, ‘she is even afraid of you! She admires you awfully, and would like you to like her, but she thinks you don’t. I told her, of course, that that was nonsense—that I was sure you liked her, and I told her that you used to talk a lot about her when you were at school.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Oh, she said that that was quite different. “People change and outgrow each other,” she said, and then she said that even then she had cared for you much more than you cared for her. She thinks you find her dull and dowdy. You do like her, don’t you, Helen?’
He asked it almost wistfully, and suddenly I wanted to cry. If I could have spoken quite frankly about Sophia, as though she did not affect me personally at all, it would have been all different; if I could have asked him straight out what he felt about her; if we could have talked to each other simply and without reserves, as we used to once, I think our lives might have been very different afterwards; but we couldn’t. He was trying to, I think, but I couldn’t respond. I was fighting against something in myself, and it was almost as though I was fighting against him. I did not want him to know my thoughts and my feelings as he used to know them; and I could not talk to him about Sophia.
I said:
‘Yes, I do like her, quite, but we haven’t an awful lot in common. I don’t think I am intellectual enough for her.’
Hugo ignored that. He said: