And later on—­in the very beginning of July it must have been—­I see him on his own lawn at his own garden-party, and—­I didn’t dream it this time—­he was really dreadful.  Instead of carrying it off with the levity that had so often saved him from perdition, there was that revolting triumph about him and an uneasy eagerness, as if he knew that his triumph wasn’t quite complete.  But the garden-party was, as he would have said, all right.  They were all there, those people he had given three months to.  He had pulled it off precisely as he had schemed and calculated.  Those legends of his detachment and his hermit habits had been worked so as to excite a supreme curiosity—­and it was being satisfied.

And I cannot tell you whether he was really altered, or whether he had been like that all the time before Amershott had shown him up, and none of us had seen it except Viola.

Oh no—­it’s impossible.  He had altered.  If he had been like this we must have seen it.  What Viola had seen—­if she had seen anything—­was only the foreshadowing, the bare possibility of this.

Charlie Thesiger was at that garden-party (he had retired from the service with the rank of Captain).

And it was at the garden-party that I first noticed a change in his manner to his cousin’s husband.  He used to treat Jevons with a certain superciliousness, and with as much amusement, as much perception of his absurdity, as was possible for Charlie, who perceived so few things.  Now I was struck with the correct young man’s deference to his host.  It was really as if it had at last dawned on Charlie that Jevons was his host, and that he had other claims to distinction as well.  The more dreadful Jimmy was, the more courteous Charlie showed himself to Jimmy.  And this in spite of the fact that Jevons had a way of treating Charlie as if he didn’t matter, as if for all recognizable purposes he wasn’t there.

When I spoke of this to Norah, she said that Viola had told him that if he couldn’t be decent to Jimmy she wouldn’t have him there.

Well, there he was, hanging about Viola from morning till night; he had any amount of time on his hands now, and he spent most of it at Amershott.  He was there when we weren’t sometimes, so that we couldn’t keep track of him.  But his purposes ought to have been apparent to us.  I think it was partly because he was aware of them himself that he went out of his way to be decent to Jimmy, almost as if he were sorry for him beforehand.

For it was evident enough that Viola liked his being there, and liked to have him hanging round her.  There was nothing about him that shocked or grated.  I’ve no doubt he made himself entirely charming.  His manners could be as beautiful as any of the Thesigers’ when he chose, and they soothed her.  I think she had ceased to feel them as a reproach to Jimmy.  She had given up his manners, poor dear, long ago, as a bad job.  It was as if she had slaked her thirst for the unusual.  Some secret and strong revulsion had thrown her back on the people and the things that she had been brought up amongst and that she had run away from.  When Jimmy jarred on her she turned to Charlie for relief.  And, after all, as Norah said, he was her cousin.