I sent him a postal order and an apology.  I referred, very handsomely as I thought, to his cuckoo’s nesting in my paper. (I informed him, in fact, that he “did it” better than I did); and because I had worked myself up to a pitch of affability and generosity, I asked him to come and see me at such time as he should be free.  And because, also, I was indifferent and lazy and didn’t want to be seriously bothered with him, instead of asking him to lunch or dine with me, I said I was generally free myself between four and five.

Between four and five was an hour when Viola was very apt to come in.

In the instant that followed the posting of that letter I saw what I had done.  And I wrote to him the next day asking him to dinner, in order that he should not come in between four and five.  For some weeks, whenever I fancied he was about due at four o’clock, I wrote and asked him to dinner.  That was how I fastened him to me.  There wasn’t any sense in which he fastened on me.  I wasn’t by any means his only hope.

I may say at once I was prostrated as any slave before his conversation.

I shall never forget the radiance of his twinkle when he told me he had been sacked three weeks ago from the sporting paper that had provided him with his sole visible means of subsistence.  It was his blessed (only he didn’t call it blessed) style that had dished him:  the suicidal elan that he brought to the business.  He was warned, he said.  He was aware that his existence as a reporter hung by the bare thread of statement (wearing thinner and thinner) on which he weaved his fantastic web.  His editor told him he was engaged to report football, not to play it with the paper.  But he couldn’t help it.  He had got, he said, the ensanguined habit.  Still, I was not to imagine that he bungled things.  He jolly well knew his way about.  In his wildest flights there was a homing impulse; he was preparing a place for himself all the time (that it happened to be my place didn’t seem to afflict him in the least).  Like St. Paul, he knew how to abound and he knew how to abstain.  His abstinence, in fact, gave the measure of his abundance.  He held himself in for five perilous weeks; and when he let himself rip again it was with a burst that landed him in the front page of the Morning Standard.

What he sketched for me had no resemblance to the career of a peaceful man of letters.  It was a hot race, a combat as bloody (his own word) as those contests of which he was the delighted eye-witness.

He had come thin and worn out of the struggle, but you gathered that he had borne himself in it with coolness and deliberate caution.  His phrases produced a false effect of vehemence and excitement.  You saw that he had simply followed out a calculated scheme, not one step of which had miscarried.  And you felt that his most passionate affairs would be conducted with the same formidable precision.