I do not know how or why he had come to look on that car as his god.  It wasn’t, I do believe that it wasn’t, because the thing was valuable, because he had sunk so much capital in that body and those engines (he had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy).  There was a sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint of grossness.  It was the car’s own purity, her unique and staggering beauty that had captivated him.  And mixed with his passion there was the remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of his intemperance in motoring.  He had evidently said to himself:  “Motor-cars are perishable things.  I did for my first beloved by my excesses.  Rather than knock this divinity about I will abstain from motoring.”  And the cab-proprietor of Midhurst must have made a fortune out of Jimmy’s abstinence.

The odd thing was that Charlie Thesiger respected it. (He too had come down for the last fortnight in July.) He was the only one of us who didn’t protest, didn’t clamour, didn’t try to reason or to laugh Jimmy out of his insanity.  And he went further.  He refused to enter the car, to be taken in it on the few suitable days when Jimmy allowed it to go out.  It was as if he were dominated by some scruple as morbid as his host’s passion.  We couldn’t account for it at the time, for he liked motoring excessively, and he couldn’t afford it.

I’ve wondered since whether this wasn’t the way Charlie settled with his conscience, his own sacrifice to decency.  He could eat Jimmy’s bread and drink his wine and stay for weeks under his roof, since his necessity—­the necessity of seeing Viola—­compelled him, but to profit by him to that extent, to make use of Jimmy’s opulence, was beyond him.  His conscience may have even said to him, “If he loves his motor-car, for God’s sake let him have that, at any rate, to himself.”

And Viola seemed to share Charlie’s scruple.  She, too, shrank from using the new car.  And I remember her saying to me one day as we crossed the courtyard and saw Jimmy, as usual, in the garage, worshipping his car, “I’m so glad he’s got it.  I think it makes him happier.”  As if she had confessed that it was all he had got; that she was not able to make him happy any more; and as if, in some day of unhappiness that she saw coming, it would be a consolation to the poor chap.  At any rate, as if she were not in the least jealous of the power it had over him.

So, that July, Norah and I drove with Jimmy when the car, so to speak, let him drive it; and Viola walked through the woods and over the downs with Charlie Thesiger.

We often wondered what they found to talk about.

That wonder, of what Viola could see in Charlie, and how she could endure for so many hours the burden of his society, was all that Norah had allowed herself, so far, to express.  If she felt any uneasiness she had not yet confided it to me.  As for Jevons, he tolerated him as you only tolerate a thing that doesn’t matter.  I think honestly that to both of them, Charlie, in any serious connection with Viola, was as impossible as Jevons himself had been to her brother Reggie.