His arrival, preceded by this attractive legend, became an event.  You couldn’t even affect to overlook it.  And if it was not possible for Jimmy to subdue his features to an expression of complete ignoring, he had got in so promptly with his attitude that it took the wind out of the sails of any people who were merely proposing to ignore.

Then, having come amongst them as a shy recluse, Jimmy began instantly to focus attention on himself.  He hadn’t been six weeks in the county before he had become the most conspicuous object in it.

I don’t know how he did it; you never really caught him at it; and yet, when you came down to stay with him, you felt all the time that he was doing it; you felt a sort of shame (a shame that he couldn’t feel) in seeing that he did it so perpetually and so well.  He had a way of making his privacy a public thing.  There was something positively indecent in his detachment; it advertised him as no possible immersion could have done.  I’ve seen him lying out on his moor basking all by himself in the sun; I’ve seen him meditating all by himself in his pinewood; I’ve seen him sitting in his walled garden, with the apparatus of his business all about him, when you would have said that if ever a man’s life was hidden and withdrawn it was Tasker Jevons’s.  And yet it wasn’t.  You knew it wasn’t; and he knew that you knew.  He knew that his gardener and his chauffeur and his butler and his cook and his housemaid and his parlourmaid knew that he was sitting in his garden writing, or meditating in his pinewood or basking on his moor in the sun, and that their knowledge penetrated to every house in the village, to every house in the county within a radius of twenty miles.  And when he was not doing any of these prominently tranquil things he was tearing about the country in his motor-car.

I have never seen anything like Jevons’s motoring.  It was in this new aspect of his that he was, I think, most remarkable.  I say he made his privacy a public thing; but in the furious publicity of his motoring it was the other way round.  He turned the public roads into a private track through paradise.  I do not mean that he was a road-hog; far from it.  He had the most exquisite manners of the road, He would slow down for a hen in the distance and upset himself into the ditch to avoid a rabbit.  I have known him (with his first car) give a lift to any filthy tramp between Midhurst and Portsmouth.  I mean that the act of motoring transported him; and he did these things instinctively, mechanically, without interruption to his rapture.  Speed and the wind of speed, the air rushing by like a water-race as he ripped through it, the streaming past him of trees and hedges, the humming and throbbing of his engines, were ecstasy to Jimmy.  He had learned to drive the thing, and his sense of power over it gave him the physical exaltation that he craved for.  I believe that when he sat in his motor-car, driving