climbing.

As for the ladies, General Thesiger's friends, I rather think the General
had settled with them at the time.

You might say we had nothing to fear from Reggie, if Reggie's
silence--and his deafness--hadn't been more terrible than anything
he could have heard or said.

I suppose nineteen-ten ought to stand as the year of Tasker Jevons's
great Play, the play that ran for a whole year after the hundredth night,
that ran on and on as if it would never stop, that, when it was taken off
the Crown stage to make room for its successor, still careered through
the provinces and the United States. It seemed the year of Jimmy's utmost
affluence. If he kept it up, we said, he'd be a millionaire before he
died of it. But it wasn't conceivable that he could keep it up for long.
We thought he'd never write another play like this one. There never would
be another year like nineteen-ten.

I believe that even Jimmy thought there'd never be another year like it,
so far had he surpassed his own calculations, as it was.

But for me nineteen-ten is the year of other things, the things that
happened in the family, the year of Reggie's return and all the misery
that came from it, the year of Viola's struggle--the agony of which we,
Norah and I, were the helpless spectators. _She_ never said a word to us.
It was Norah who conveyed to me the secret, intimate shock of it.

That year Jimmy rained boxes and stalls and theatre-parties for his play
on all the Thesigers (except Reggie) and on all their friends, and on
Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands when they came back from Simla and
Gibraltar (it was the year of their return too); but we stood behind the
scenes of a tragedy that mercifully was hidden from Jimmy's eyes. It was
the year when Mildred broke off her engagement to Charlie Thesiger. It
was the year when our little girl, Viola, was born; the year when we
moved from our Bloomsbury flat into the little house in Edwardes Square,
taking over the end of the lease and all the fixtures and some of the
furniture from Jimmy. Jimmy hadn't a child, and he had sworn that he
never would have one; he was so afraid (and this fear was the only thing
that disturbed his optimism), so horribly afraid that Viola might die.
But he had outgrown the house in Edwardes Square. It was the year of his
first really startling expansion.

It was the year when he moved into the house in Mayfair.

Why Mayfair we really couldn't think. He said he lik