We hadn’t allowed for the reaction—­he was bound to feel it after three months’ unnatural repression; we hadn’t allowed for the reaction that Viola was bound to feel after three years’ unnatural detachment; we hadn’t allowed for the state of her nerves after her illness; there were all sorts of things we hadn’t allowed for, and they all came at once; they burst out from under their covers one evening in June when Norah and I were dining in Green Street.

It was one of Jimmy’s gestures that began it.  Viola had never been able to control his gestures; she had never been able to get used to them; and there were two in particular that made her wince still as she had winced in the beginning.  She had contracted the habit of wincing in response to them.  Whenever Jimmy jerked his thumb over his shoulder you saw her blink; and whenever he cracked his knuckles she shrank back.  The blink followed the jerk, and the shrinking followed the cracking as the flash follows the snap of the trigger.

I have never known Jimmy jerk as he jerked that evening.  When Norah had no salad, when my glass was empty, when Viola wanted more potatoes, when he wanted more potatoes himself, Jimmy jerked his thumb.  The butler seemed to have made it a point of honour to acknowledge no other signal.  And every time it happened I noticed the increasing violence of Viola’s reaction.  What had once been a gentle flicker of the eyelashes was now a succession of spasms that left her eyebrows twisted.

And at the fifth jerk she covered her eyes with her hands and cried out, “Jimmy, if you do that once more I shall scream.”

Poor Jimmy asked innocently, “What did I do?”

“You jerked your thumb.  You jerked it five times, and I simply cannot bear it.”

“All right—­all right,” said Jimmy.  “I needn’t jerk it again.  It’s quite easy not to.”

“I was afraid it wasn’t,” she sighed.

I was thinking, “Whatever will she do if he cracks his knuckles?” and that very minute he cracked them.  The butler, demoralized by Jimmy’s methods, had gone out of the room just when he was wanted.  That annoyed Jimmy.  I have never known him produce such a detonation.

Viola started as if he had hit her.  But she said nothing this time.

Jimmy didn’t see her.  He was looking over his shoulder to see whether the butler was or was not answering his summons.  And then—­I think that at one period of his life he must have been a little proud of his accomplishment—­he did it again.  He did it crescendo, fortissimo, prestissimo, strabato and con molto expressione; he played on his knuckles with a virtuosity of which I have never seen the like.

The sheer technique of the performance ought to have disarmed her. (It enchanted Norah.  But then Norah hadn’t had an illness.) She flung a wild look round the room as if she called on treacherous heavenly powers to save her, then rose and very slowly, in silence and a matchless dignity, she walked out, past me, past Jimmy, past the returning butler, and down the passage and into the Tudor hall.