I must have seemed a bit lost among his allusions, for he blurted it out.

“D’you know, I’ve been most awfully sorry for chaffing you in that idiotic way—­about—­your sister-in-law.  Silly sort of thing one says, you know.  But of course you knew I was pulling your leg.”

I said, “My dear Withers, of course I knew you were.”

Of course I knew he was doing nothing of the sort, for Withers slandered right and left when it wasn’t worth his while to grovel, and I had no doubt now that he believed his own dirty tale when he told it; but he had been impressed and thoroughly frightened, even at the time, by the calmness of my bluff, and the little beast was far more afraid of us than we ever could have been of him now.  We could henceforth dismiss Withers from our minds.  He was a “social climber” of the sort that would eat his own words if he thought they would do the smallest damage to his 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.