Twenty-Six Year Old – Georgie Hands
I had known Georgie Hands for three years, and she had been my mistress for over eighteen months. Georgie, who is now twenty-six, had been an undergraduate at Cambridge, where she had taken a degree in economics. She had then become a graduate student, and more lately a junior lecturer, at the London School of Economics. I had met her, in her early days in London when I visited the school once to give a lecture on Machiavelli’s account of the campaigns of Cesare Borgia to a student society, and we had met subsequently a few times, had lunch together, and even exchanged some friendly consoling kisses, without anything remarkable occurring in the heart of either. I had never hitherto deceived my wife, and imagined that I had no possible intention of doing so; and it was pure accident that I never introduced Georgie to Antonia in those early and innocent days. Georgie was living then in a hostel for women students, a dreary place which I never attempted to visit. Then she moved into her little flat; and I promptly fell in love with her. It may sound ludicrous, but I think I fell in love with her as soon as I saw her bed.
