Judith was the only one he never mocked at. She was quite immune. He did not always take notice of her, of course, being at Eton, and she much younger; but when he did, he was always kindly—even interested; so that it seemed unjust to dislike him so much, except for Charlie’s sake.
He was an uncomfortable person. If you had been alone with him it was a relief to get back to the others. His senses were too acute, his mind too angular. He would not let anything alone. He was always prying and poking restlessly, testing and examining, and making you do the same, insistently holding your attention as long as he wanted it, so that his company was quite exhausting. He always hoped to find people more intelligent, more interesting than they were, and he would not let them alone till he had discovered their inadequacy and thrown them away.
But the more he poked at a person’s mind, the more that person withdrew. He had that knack. He spent his time doing himself no good, repelling where he hoped to attract. He was of a didactical turn of mind. He loved instructing; and he knew so much about his subjects and was so anxious to impart all he knew that he would go on and on and on. It was very tiresome. Judith was too polite to show her boredom, so she got a lot of instruction. Sometimes he tried when they were alone together to make her tell him her thoughts, which would have been terribly embarrassing but that he soon lost interest in them and turned to his own. He himself had a great many thoughts which he threw at her pell mell. He had contemptuous ideas about religion. He had just become an unbeliever, and he said ‘God’ in quite an ordinary unashamed conversational voice. Sometimes she understood his thoughts, or pretended to, to save the explanation, and sometimes she let him explain, because it made him so pleased and enthusiastic. He would contort himself all over with agony searching for the right, the perfect words in which to express himself, and if he was satisfied at the end he hummed a little tune. He loved words passionately: he invented very good ones. Also he made the most screamingly funny monstrous faces to amuse them all, if he felt cheerful. Generally however, he was morose when they were all together, and went away alone, looking as if he despised and distrusted them. Judith discovered he did not really prefer to be alone: he liked one other person, a listener. It made him light up impetuously and talk and talk. The others thought him conceited, and he was; yet all the time he was less conceited than self-abasing and sensitive, less overbearing than diffident. He could not laugh at himself, only at others; and he never forgave a person who laughed at him.
He told untruths to a disconcerting extent. Judith told a great many herself, so she was very quick to detect his, and always extremely shocked. Once the grandmother said:
‘Who broke the punt pole?’
And they all said:
‘I didn’t.’
Then she said patiently:
‘Well, who went punting yesterday?’ And Martin, red and anxious with his desire to conceal nothing cried joyfully: ‘I did.’—adding almost with disappointment: ‘But I didn’t break the pole.’ His truthfulness was quite painfully evident. Nobody had broken the pole.
Julian whistled carelessly for a bit after that, so Judith knew.