to do something. And he did it. He left off his uneasy swagger and
his rocking. He met the heroic and beautiful faces of the Thesigers with
his engaging twinkle. He sought out and ministered to two young girls who
had been brought there by the minor confraternity and were hiding in a
corner on the point of hysteria. We heard him telling them that the
throne-room was being built out over the scullery leads (he must have
known what the minor confraternity had been up to), that in the great
fireplace in his kitchen you could roast three journalists whole, and
that the question of the family portraits was receiving his attention. He
had a deal on with the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery for the
purchase of the Holbein Henry the Eighth. By the time he had finished it
was open to us to suppose that the house in Mayfair was his joke and not
ours, that he had furnished it in this preposterous manner in order to be
really and truly funny, and to keep himself and Viola in perfect and
perpetual gaiety. It was as if he were trying to say to us, "None of you
people--least of all the confraternity--knows how to live. Life isn't a
calamity; it's a joke; and to live properly you should meet life in its
own spirit; you should do exuberant and gay and gorgeous things, like
me."

And then when we had all come round, he rearranged all the furniture in
his drawing-room for charades (showing no respect whatever for his
satinwood suite); and after the charades he rolled up his Aubusson carpet
and cleared the place for a dance that was ruin to his parquet floor.
And we had supper; and then more dancing till four o'clock in the
morning.

Of the dancing I remember nothing but Viola whirling round and round, as
it were for ever, in Charlie Thesiger's arms, and her dead-white face
looking over his shoulder, as if she saw nothing, nothing whatever; as if
she were detached even from the arms that held her.

My last recollection is of Jimmy's face when Norah said to him, "Oh,
Jimmy, I _love_ your dear little lions!"--and Jimmy's answer:

"Little lions--yes--they make me feel tall and majestic."

"He _is_ going it, isn't he?" said Charlie Thesiger.

* * * * *

At this point, when I look back over what I've written, it seems to me
that I've done nothing but record changes so many and so marked that
their history has no sort of continuity. But in reality it was not so. Up
to December, nineteen-ten, there