The delicate matter was this.  He had given Miss Thesiger a lot of work, the typing of a whole book, in fact.  And—­he had immense difficulty in getting to this part of it—­she had refused to take any payment.  She had got it into her head that he was hard up.  He had sent her a cheque three times, and three times she had returned it.  She was as obstinate as a mule about it.  And now she was saying that she had never meant him to pay her; she had done the whole thing out of friendship, which, of course, was very pretty of her, but it put him in a beastly position.  He’d never been precisely in that position before and he didn’t know what to do about it.  He didn’t want to offend her and yet he didn’t see—­did I?—­how he could let her do it.  It was, he said, all the wrong way about, according to his notions.  And for the life of him he didn’t know what to do.  It might seem to me incredible that such virgin innocence as his should exist in a world where the rules for most sorts of conduct were fairly settled.  He had lived all his life in an atmosphere of births, marriages and deaths, and he knew all the rules for the registration of them.  And that was about all he did know.  And it was the most infernally hard luck to be stumped like this at the very beginning, just when he wanted most awfully to do the right thing.

Besides, it had knocked him all to bits—­the sheer prettiness of it.

He laid bare for me all the curious intricacies of a soul tortured by its own delicacy.  There was agony in his eyes.

If he were to take this kindness from a lady—­would it, in my opinion, or would it not, be cricket?

I didn’t like to tell him that he had brought his agony on himself by his imprudence in employing a typist when he couldn’t afford one.  So I only said that, if I knew the lady, he would find her uncommonly hard to move.

He hadn’t any hope, he said, of moving her; but did I think that if he made her a present—­say, the Collected Works of George Meredith, it would meet the case?

I said it would meet the case all right, but that in my opinion it would spoil its prettiness.  If Miss Thesiger didn’t want to be paid in one way, she wouldn’t at all care about being paid in another.  Perhaps Miss Thesiger liked being pretty.  Hadn’t he better leave it at that, anyhow, for the present?

You see I looked on Viola and Viola’s behaviour as infinitely more my concern than his.  I found myself replying for her as she would have wished me to reply, as if I could claim an intenser appreciation of her motives than was his, as if she and I were agreed about this question of helping Tasker Jevons and I were the custodian of her generosity.

He said he supposed it wouldn’t hurt him to leave it at that.  It wasn’t as if it wouldn’t be all one in the long run.  He gave himself three months.

I supposed he meant to pay her in.

Three weeks later I heard that Jevons was actually living up in Hampstead in the same house as Viola.  I didn’t hear it from Viola, but from my man, Pavitt, who had it from his sister-in-law.  And what Pavitt came to tell me was that Mr. Jevons had been ill.