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n the September quarter of nineteen-eight. This was the year of the weeks of consolidation, his second novel and his "Journal," that were to precede the Grand Attack. The novel did exactly what he said it would. It did counteract the effect its predecessor; and the "Journal" gave him a place in _Belles-Lettres_ where he was safe from the legend of his own brutality. But it strained his relations with the Thesigers for the time being. The Rosalind of the "Journal" is so obviously Viola, and though he is careful to refer to her as his wife, the book reminded people that they were said to have travelled together before they were married. Her figure moves through the grey Flemish cities and the grey Flemish landscape with an adorable innocence and naivete, a trifle slenderer and tenderer than the Viola I remember, who always had for me an air of energy and obstinacy and defiance, but for Jevons, perhaps, not more slender or more tender than the Viola he knew. You couldn't say she wasn't charming. The Canon couldn't say it; what he did say was that Jevons should have kept her out of it. Jevons's defence was that if he had kept her out of it there wouldn't have been any book. But he never did it again. Having once for all drawn her portrait as a young girl, he left it, as if he would have kept her youth immortal. You will not find any woman of his novels who suggests even a fugitive likeness to the Viola he married. The house in Edwardes Square stands for the second period: the period of sober energy that led up to the Grand Attack. It was also the period of deliberate yet vehement refinement. Jevons was determined at all cost to be refined. And at considerable cost, with white-painted panelling throughout, with blue-and-white Chinese vases here and there, and more and more Bokhara rugs everywhere, and tussore silk curtains in the windows and every stick of furniture chosen for its premeditated chastity, the little brown house was made to serve him as a holy standard. He said he had only got to live up to it and he would be all right. And so, in the quest of purging and salvation through the beauty of his surroundings, he had made his place perfect inside and out, from the diminutive flagged court in the front (with one brilliant mat of flowers laid down in the middle) to the last lovely border of the grass-garden at the back. I wondered, I have never ceased to wonder, knowing his beginnings, how he did it so well. Of
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