After dinner the Canon talked to Jevons about his novel. (He had retired into his library all afternoon in order to finish it.) He asked him why he had chosen an ugly subject when he might have found a beautiful one?

And Jevons was more pensive than ever.  He said, “Well—­that’s a question—­”

He couldn’t tell the Canon why he’d chosen it.  He couldn’t disclose to him his plan of campaign.

“You see, sir, I haven’t seen many beautiful things.”

He still pondered.  Then he said, very slowly, as if he dragged it out of himself with difficulty, “That book was written—­written in my head—­before I knew my wife.”

You could literally see his score running up.  By nine o’clock the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger had roped him into their game of whist.

I sat out with Viola and Norah in the garden, when Norah told us that she thought Jimmy was a dear.  She was the only one of them that called him Jimmy.

About ten o’clock next morning Viola came to me and asked me to go up to Jimmy, in his room.  He wanted to speak to me.

I found him packing, packing with a sort of precise and concentrated fury.

He was going.  Going up to town.  He had torn through Canterbury, eaten his way through Canterbury, through the beauty and peace of it; he had absorbed and assimilated it in three days.  And he had had enough.  If he stayed in it another hour the beauty and the peace of it would kill him.  The Canon’s beauty was, he said, adorable; so was Mrs. Thesiger’s.

“But if I stay here I shall ruin it.  I can’t,” he said, “go on giving that dear old clergyman clergyman’s sore throat.  I frighten him so that he can’t sing.  He doesn’t know what to do with me, or say to me.  He doesn’t know what to call me.  He can’t call me Jevons, and he won’t call me Jimmy, and he knows it would be ridiculous to call me James.  Besides, he agitates me and makes me drop my aitches.

“So I’ve had a wire.  You’ll explain to him the sort of wire I’ve had.”

“And Viola?” I said.  “Is she going too?”

“No.  Viola’s going to stay till our week’s up.  By that time she’ll be bored stiff and longing to get back to me.”

* * * * *

He went, and I’m not at all sure that he didn’t score by going.

And that night and the next and the next I thought of little Jevons alone in his little house in Hampstead, lying all by himself in his four-post bed between his rosebud chintz curtains and under his rosebud chintz tester, and saying to himself that he had scored.

VII

The Thesigers lived to be grateful to me for reconciling them to Jevons, if it was I who reconciled them.  I don’t think Mrs. Thesiger ever really forgave him, ever really liked him till the end; but the Canon very soon owned to a surreptitious regard for him.  Luckily he acquired it while Jevons was still struggling, otherwise I do not think I could have saved their faces.