But for sheer pluck and presence of mind not one of them could touch Jevons.  He rose, he soared, he poised himself, he turned and swept above them; you could feel the tense vibration that kept him there, in his atmosphere of deadly peril.  He volplaned, he looped the loop. His behaviour was unsurpassable.  For his case, if you like, was desperate.  I tell you he had seen the effect of his Tudor hall and drawing-room.  He had been watching; and nothing, not a murmur, or a furtive snigger, not the quiver of an eyelash, had escaped him.  And consider what it meant to him.  In a furious climax of expenditure he had achieved the arresting spectacle of his house in Mayfair, and his first night, his house-warming, was turning under his eyes into a triumph for the Thesigers’ manners and a failure for him.  He had no illusions.  Unless he did something to stop it, the whole thing would be one enormous and lamentable and expensive failure.

He had 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: