Marriage of Hermione by Richmal Crompton

Author:Richmal Crompton [Crompton, Richmal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Chapter Thirteen

SHE went slowly upstairs to her bedroom, opening Alan’s letter on the way.

Alan—now in his first year at Oxford—was spending part of his vacation reading with a friend in Somerset. He had done well with Mr. Swallow, missing a scholarship to Oxford by only a few marks.

“He’s one of the quickest, most responsive boys I’ve ever taught,” Mr. Swallow had said. “Mind you, he’s not a scholar. Don’t expect him to end up as a Fellow or Professor or anything like that—but he’s got more originality and imagination and a quicker grasp of things than nine out of ten boys of his age.”

Alan had long ago grown out of his childish fits of hysteria, but he remained painfully shy, especially with strangers. Under the mellowing influence of university life, however, he was fast losing his self-consciousness. He played no games—he had always disliked games—and the river meant to him only lazy afternoons in a punt, but he had at once been admitted to the artistic set of his college, and for the first time in his life was living with people whose scale of values was the same as his own. He was gaining a new poise and assurance and had already lost the air of bewildered shrinking that he had had before he went there. He was dimly conscious that he possessed creative powers and was blindly fumbling for an outlet for them. He had written several poems that were enthusiastically acclaimed by his friends.

To Charles, of course, his college career had been as great a disappointment as his boyhood. He had secretly hoped that it would “make a man” of him. John had played rugger for his college and had rowed in the Cambridge boat. It had been the proudest moment of Charles’s life when he heard that John had won his blue, and nothing could have been in Charles’s eyes more despicable and unmanly than the life Alan led—taking no part in games or sports, mooning about with a set of unhealthy “muffs”, as Charles scornfully called them. Curiously, Alan still retained his childhood’s admiration of Charles, admiring in particular that very “manliness” whose lack in himself was the chief cause of his father’s contempt.

In her bedroom Hermione sat down in an armchair by the window to read his letter.

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