Well, of course I didn’t spend Whitsuntide with the Thesigers at Canterbury.  It would have been sheer waste of Viola.  For the worst of all this confounded rumpus was that it made me put off proposing to Viola till she had forgotten all about it.  She would never have listened to me while the trail of the scandal still lingered.

In fact, it was only the marked coldness of my manner to her just then that saved me.

* * * * *

It saved me to suffer.  I didn’t know it was possible to suffer as she made me suffer—­I mean as they made me, between them.

It didn’t begin all at once.  It didn’t begin, really, for another three months, the end of those six months that Jevons had given himself.  Not even then.  Not, you may say, for a whole year; because he gave himself another six months as soon as he saw her.  He was always giving himself these periods of time, as if, with his mania for taking risks, he was always having some prodigious bet on himself.  I never knew a man back his own enterprises as he did.

But until he turned up again I was happy.  I say I, not we.  I don’t know whether Viola was happy or not, though she looked it.  I had enough sense to see that her happiness, if she was happy, had nothing to do with me except in so far as I was the humble means, under Providence, of the definite escape from Canterbury.

For I very soon saw what had been the matter with her.  She was one of nine, the youngest but one of seven daughters.  The Minor Canon had only been able to educate one of the seven properly, because he had had a son at Sandhurst, and the other was still reading for the Bar, which is pretty expensive too if you’re as amiably stupid as Bertie Thesiger. (I mention Bertie because, though he doesn’t come into this story, his stupidity and his amiability combined to tighten the situation considerably for Viola.) And Mrs. Thesiger had only been able to marry off two of her seven daughters.  Of the others, one (the one who had been to Girton) was a High School teacher in Canterbury and she lived at home; one was a trained nurse and lived at home between cases; that left three girls living continually at home and, as Viola put it, eating their heads off.

These were the circumstances which Viola (with some omissions) recited by way of justification for her revolt; the fact being that she would have revolted anyway.  She was, as I have said, a creature of high courage and vitality and she was tied up much too tight in that Cathedral Close, besides being much too well fed; and she longed to do things.  To do them with her hands and with her head.  She was tired of playing tennis on the velvet lawns of the Canons’ gardens; she was tired of calling on the Canons’ wives and talking to their daughters.  I am aware that Canterbury is a garrison town and that other resources, and other prospects, I suppose, were open to Viola.  But Viola was tired of talking