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.  Anyhow, her behaviour amounted to an evasion of Jimmy, and this particular evasion was sad enough when you consider that in the beginning it had been Jimmy who had taken her to look at the Belfry—­who was the one man who could be trusted to take her, and that she would never have dreamed of setting off on such an adventure by herself, and that she wasn’t fitted for it.  In fact, I can’t think of anybody less fit.

It showed more than anything how the glamour must have worn off him.