course he gave Viola a free hand,
he let her have what she wanted; but when I complimented her on any
result she let me know at once that it was Jimmy's doing. She was
pathetically anxious that I should see that he knew how. She let me know,
too, the secret of his passionate absorption in gardens and interiors,
lest I should think it argued any unmanliness in him.

I remember so well her showing me that house in Edwardes Square. I had
called one afternoon when I had known that Jevons wasn't there. I had
left him at his club in Dover Street. (He had a club in Dover Street now;
it was my club; I had put him up for it. He enjoyed his club as he
enjoyed everything else that he had acquired by conquest; his membership
marked another step in his advance, another strip of alien territory
gained. And he had chosen this club, he said, because most of the members
had retired, to cultivate adipose tissue on pensions, and they made him
feel adolescent and slender and energetic.) I had left him in the library
writing letters (he said he found a voluptuous pleasure in writing
letters on the club paper under that irreproachable address), and I
rushed off in a taxi to Viola in Edwardes Square.

She was very glad to see me, and she gave me tea, poured out of an
early eighteenth-century silver teapot, in beautiful old blue-and-white
Chinese teacups. She wore one of those absurd narrow coats with tails
that made women look like long, slender birds that year, and she had done
something unexpected with her hair; it was curls, curls, curls all over,
the way they did it then, and she sat on a wine-coloured sofa with a
wine-coloured rug at her feet.

She began straight away by talking about Jimmy's last book, the
"Journal."

"Don't you see _now_," she said, "why I went out to him, and how
beautiful it all was?"

I asked her did she think I'd ever doubted? She said: "No. But Daddy
hates the book. So does Mummy. They all hate it except Norah and me. I'm
glad he wrote it. I'm glad he put me into it. I never knew I was so nice,
did you?"

"Oh, come," I said, "surely I always knew?"

But she didn't pay any attention to me. She didn't care to know what I
thought or what I knew. She wasn't thinking of me or of herself. She was
defending Jimmy with little jerky, stabbing thrusts of defiance. You
could see that the smallest criticism of him made her suffer; that she
was capable of infinite suffering where Jimmy was concerned. Also you saw
tha