OUR FRIEND JUDITH
463
irritated rather than not to receive letters of apology from him
-fulsome, embarrassed, but above all, baffled.
It was the note of curiosity in the letters-he even sug–
gested coming over to get to know her better-that irritated
her most. "What do you suppose he means?" she said to me.
"He lived in my flat for ten days. One would have thought
that should be enough, wouldn't you?"
The facts about Judith, then, are all in the open, uncon–
cealed, and plain to anyone who cares to study them; or, as
it became plain she feels-to anyone with the intelligence to
interpret them.
She has lived for the last twenty years in a small two–
roomed flat high over a busy West London street. The flat
is
shabby and badly heated. The furniture is old, was never any–
thing but ugly, is now frankly rickety and fraying. She has
an income of £200 a year from a dead uncle. She lives on this
and what she earns from her poetry, and from lecturing on
poetry to night classes and extra-mural University classes.
She does not smoke or drink, and eats very little, from
preference, not self-discipline.
She studied poetry and biology at Oxford, with distinction.
She is a Castlewell. That is, she is a member of one of the
academic upper-middle-class families, which have been pro–
ducing for centuries a steady supply of brilliant but sound
men and women who are the backbone of the arts and sciences
in
Britain. She is on cool good terms with her family who
respect her and leave her alone.
She goes on long walking tours, by herself, in such places
as Exmoor or West Scotland.
Every three or four years she publishes a volume of poems.
The walls of her flat are completely lined with books.
They are scientific, classical and historical; there
is
a great
deal of poetry and some drama. There
is
not one novel. When
Judith says: "Of course I don't read novels," this does not
mean that novels have no place, or a small place,
in
