I don’t think we either of us saw anything more in it than that.  Without some such reaction she must have surrendered to Amershott.  She couldn’t defend Jevons against that showing up.  She couldn’t defend herself against those revelations, she could only stand by and look on at his enormity and shudder.  Unless she had put her dear eyes out she must have seen that in the country he was not only a bounder but a snob.  And she must have writhed in feeling that to see him that way was to be a bit of a snob herself.  She had accused herself of snobbishness long ago, before she married him, when, in order to marry him, she had burned her boats.

What could she do?  She couldn’t put her eyes out.  But I believe she would have been grateful to anybody who would have put them out for her.

I can’t tell whether she was always unhappy.  I rather think she had liked Amershott, the house and the garden and the pinewood and the bit of moor, and I am certain that she liked motoring almost as much as Jimmy did at first.  She could even take pleasure in Jimmy’s power over the car when they were alone with it in the open country, when his pleasure had no taint in it.  I’ve heard her say, when he wanted to run down to Chichester or Portsmouth, “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, let’s go somewhere where nobody can look at us!”

She must have regarded the open country as the last refuge of his innocence.  For her, more than for any of us, he had lost it.

* * * * *

How far he really lost it we shall never know.  Even now, with all my lights, with that intense country light fairly beating on him, I can wonder:  Am I saying these things because I think them?  Or because I believe I must have thought them then?  And I cannot answer my own wonder.  I remember how at Amershott, when I sat beside him in that car of his and watched his ecstasy, I used to pull myself up and say to myself, “You know he isn’t like that.  Look at him—­what woolly lamb could be more simple and innocent than he is now?” And if anybody had come to me and asked me if I didn’t think that Jevons was a little awful I should have said that if you were a little awful yourself you might think so, but not otherwise.  My conscience has told me that as he became more successful I became more critical; it has even suggested that I may have been jealous of his success.

* * * * *

But that was in the days (they were comparatively innocent) of his first motor-car.  Round that car there really is a light of romance and of adventure, a glamour that isn’t at all the glamour of his opulence.  In those days he did look upon a motor-car mainly as an instrument of pleasure, and not as a vulgar advertisement of his income.  In June, at any rate, he was still the master of his car and not—­as we saw him later on—­its servant.  There never was anything like that first fury of his motoring.