to the garrison.  I think she would have been tired in any case, even if the garrison hadn’t been bespoken, as it were, by her unmarried sisters. (It is, humanly speaking, impossible that, even in a garrison town, seven sisters will all marry into the Service, as I fatuously supposed Mrs. Thesiger must have realized when she asked me to Canterbury.) It always bored Viola to do what her family did, and what her family, just because they did it, expected her to do.  And somehow, in the long hours spent in the Cathedral Close, she had acquired a taste for what she called “literature,” what she innocently believed to be literature.  She was of an engaging innocence in this respect; so that typing authors’ manuscripts appealed to her as a vocation that combined one of the highest forms of cerebral activity with I don’t know what glamour of romantic adventure.

Her enthusiasm, her veneration for the written word made her an admirable typist.  But not all at once.  To say that she brought to her really horrible task a respect, a meticulous devotion, would give you no idea of the child’s attitude; it was a blind, savage superstition that would have been exasperating if it had not been so heart-rending.  It cleared gradually until it became intelligent co-operation.

I trained her for six months.

I don’t suppose I ever worked harder than I did in that first half year of her.  I mean my output was never greater.  For every blessed thing I wrote was an excuse for going to see her, or for her coming to see me.  It was a perpetual journeying between my rooms in Brunswick Square, and her rooms in Hampstead overlooking the Heath.  The more I wrote the more I saw of her.

I trained her for six months—­until Jevons was ready for her.

When I tell you that she reverenced my performances you may imagine in what spirit she approached his.

For their meeting, as for what happened afterwards, I alone am responsible.  I brought it on myself.  By sheer quixotic fuss and interference with what, after all, wasn’t my affair.  For little Jevons most decidedly was not.  I might easily have let that sleeping dog lie.  He certainly did sleep, in some obscure kennel of London; he had slept ever since I had left him at the door of that restaurant in Soho.  He slept almost for the six months he had then given himself.

And then, before (according to his own schedule) he was quite due, he appeared in the columns (in my columns) of the Morning Standard.  I had almost forgotten his existence; but when I saw his name, James Tasker Jevons, stick out familiarly under the big headlines, I remembered that that name, on a card with an address, had been lying in my left-hand writing-table drawer all this time; I remembered that it was there because he had lent me half a crown, and that I had never paid him.  Then he came back to me—­he lived again.