I could not extend a Christian forgiveness and
forbearance to Jevons, any more than Mrs. Thesiger could. I think I hated
Jevons. I ought to have hated him--by every glorious and manly code,
pagan or barbarous, I ought to have hated him. And I did--every minute
that he wasn't there. He had made me a figure of preposterous suffering.
Because of him I trailed a fatuous tragedy through the Thesigers' house
and over the green lawns of the Close, under the eyes of the young
subalterns and of Victoria and Norah. (Canon and Mrs. Thesiger I didn't
mind so much.) It mattered nothing that they were all extremely kind to
me, since my suffering was responsible for their kindness and Jevons was
responsible for my suffering.

Well, on that Tuesday he arrived. He was asked for a week and he stayed
three days; and in those three days I had forgiven him everything for the
sake of his performance.

He arrived in the middle of a tennis-party.

The Thesigers hadn't meant to have a party. The subalterns must have
known that he was coming and turned up simply to look at him. (I wondered
afterwards whether Norah could have told them. She was dangerously demure
that afternoon.)

I ought to have said that for the last two days the Canon had been
preparing himself for Jevons by reading him. He had ordered--in defiance
of his political principles--the _Morning Standard_, and I had found him
reading Jevons's novel and surrounded by numbers of the _Blue Review_,
which, if you remember, published the best of Jevons's earlier work. He
had no difficulty in getting hold of them; his youngest daughter had been
able to supply him with more Jevons than he wanted. In fact, in the study
of Tasker Jevons the Canon was weeks behind the rest of his acquaintance.
There was hardly a family in Canterbury of any education in which Tasker
Jevons was not by this time a household word. The garrison club library
had bought him in quantities. The bookseller in the precincts did not
stock him (he was not allowed to); but he could order him for you, and
did. And the book-sellers in the High Street displayed him in their
windows by the half-dozen.

I have forgotten, in the blaze of his later fame, that (apart from this
purely local reputation) he passed in the provinces as a fair-sized
celebrity even then. Only, as Jevons judged himself at every stage with
accuracy, he hadn't begun to take himself at all seriously yet.

So he arrived in a perfect simplicity, without