I remember perfectly everything that Jevons said to me that night.  I am putting it all down so that it may be clear that what the Thesigers called the beauty of my behaviour was nothing to the beauty of his.  Think of him, shut up there in his hotel in Bruges, giving me my innings, when he could have struck in and won the game without waiting those horrible ten days.

Well, I suppose he knew that he had it in his hands all the time.

“You see,” he went on, “I knew you’d got one chance, and I meant you to have it.  I meant you to make the most of it.  There are things, Furnival, I haven’t got the hang of—­yet—­little, little things like breeding and good looks, where you might get the pull of me still if you had a free hand.

“Well, I gave you a free hand.

“You needn’t thank me.  I wasn’t thinking of you so much.  I was thinking of Viola.  I wanted to be perfectly fair to her.  If there was a chance of her liking you better than she liked me, and being happier with you, I wanted her to have her chance.  I wanted, you see, to be rather more than fair.  If I was going to win this game I was going to win it hands over, not just to sneak in on a doubtful point.  I wanted Viola to know what she was doing.  I wanted her to see exactly what she was giving up if she married me—­to go home and see it all over again in case she had forgotten.

“And of course I was thinking of myself too.  I’m an egoist.  For my own sake I wanted her to be quite sure she hadn’t any sort of hankering after you.”

I said if it was any comfort to him he could be.  Viola hadn’t any hankering after me at all.  This—­if he cared to know it—­was the third time that I had proposed to her and been turned down.

He said he did care to know it, very much.  It was most important.

“I,” he said, “have never proposed to her at all.

“That,” he went on, “is just the one risk I wouldn’t take.

“And there,” he explained, “is where I’ve scored.  I knew that Viola is obstinate, and that if she starts by turning you down she’ll keep it up out of sheer cussedness.

“So I never let her start.  Women,” he generalized, “admire success.  If I were to give you your innings all over again, Furnival—­and I will if you like—­you couldn’t make anything of them with those three howlers to your account.  There isn’t any record of failure against me.  Good God!  D’you suppose I’d be such a damn fool as to muff it three times with the same woman?  Not me!”

I said he needn’t rub it in.

He said he was rubbing it in for my good, so that I shouldn’t go and do the same thing next time.

“Because—­now we’re coming to the point—­there will be a next time for you, Furnival.  That’s why I don’t even pretend to be sorry for you.  There’ll be other women.  But there aren’t any next times for me, and there aren’t any other women.  This—­I mean she—­was my one chance.  It was pretty jumpy work, I can tell you, sitting tight and gambling with it for ten blasted days.  Any other man would have gone clean off his chump with worrying over it.  There’ve been times when I’ve felt like it myself.  It was infernal—­when you think what I stood to lose.”