med to show
no adequate sense of what had happened. Her detachment was the unnatural
and dreadful thing.

And this happiness of his was at Viola's mercy. It would last just so
long as she could keep him from knowing that he had outraged the beauty,
the fitness and the simplicity she loved. I thought how he had once
boasted that he knew what she wanted, that he knew what she was thinking
and feeling all the time. How could he have imagined that she wanted
_this_? What was his knowledge worth if he didn't know what she would
think and feel about it?

Unless, indeed, she had lied to him. Lied from first to last,
deliberately and consummately, over each separate thing and over all the
pretentious silliness and waste of it. Norah declared that it was so, and
it looked like it. And more than anything it showed where my poor Viola
had got to. It was so unlike her to lie, so unlike her to stand aside,
where you would have thought she would have most wanted to plunge in; the
calculation and the indifference both were so beyond her that you could
only think one thing: she hated it; she hated the new turn his prosperity
had taken; she almost hated him because of it; and her heart was broken
because of Reggie, and it was hardening where it broke; she hated Reggie
at moments; and she had moments of hating Jevons because he had come
between them; and she was compounding with her conscience, punishing
herself for all these hatreds and for a thousand secret criticisms and
disloyalties and repugnances; avenging, as it were beforehand, all
hatreds and criticisms, disloyalties and repugnances to come. For she saw
it all now--how it was going to be. And she was trying to make up for it
by giving Jimmy his own way in the things that, as she had said, "didn't
matter."

And if Jimmy's way was to surround her with pretentious silliness instead
of beautiful simplicity, then she must rise above her surroundings. Her
spirit, at any rate, must refuse to be surrounded.

Her attitude was more lofty than you can imagine. As Norah had said,
there would always be a Belfry--something high and unusual--in Viola's
life. Well, she was going to live in the Belfry, that was all. And if she
was to be perfectly safe in her Belfry, and Jimmy perfectly happy in his
Tudor hall, he mustn't know that she was there.

I don't know how she really put it to herself; I don't suppose she "put"
it any way; but subconsciously, as they say, it must have been like that.