‘No, I generally do what I want—or at any rate I don’t do what I don’t want.’ And I thought of Cousin Delia and Yearsly, and how seldom the question had arisen.
Walter said:
‘That is better. That is much better. That is partly what I felt about you!’
He said it with a sudden vehemence and then stopped short. I looked at him and he was looking at me. I felt suddenly uneasy, and an odd ridiculous feeling came over me that I was really outside a safe wall, in a strange country, and I wanted to go back.
I said:
‘We will go back now, or we shall be lost. It will be too steep further on.’
Walter said:
‘It is too steep now. We must go on now we are here.’
And I felt as though we were walking in a dream, as though everything that he said and that I said were symbolic and fraught with a deeper meaning than we knew. It was an odd exciting feeling and made me a little bit afraid.
We found a track along the fell, and walked on it, and Walter began to talk about his work on the Roman inscriptions in Britain. He told me too that he had been appointed to a lectureship in Archæology in London University.