In the first year of his marriage Jevons made them see how right I was when I told them it would be impossible to ignore him.  In the second year they saw that he had only just given them time to come round before it was too late.  The minute he became prosperous it would have been too late, much too late for their dignity and beauty.  And yet they couldn’t very well have gone on repudiating Viola for ever.  A year would have seen them through that attitude.  And Jevons’s great coup had come off in the year he “gave” it; so that if they had been left to themselves their revulsion of tenderness must have coincided with his prosperity.  They would have had every appearance of having surrendered to his income.

And they would have missed the spectacle of his struggle.

I believe it was his struggle, the doggedness, the heroism, the wild humour that he put into it that brought them round.  They didn’t like his early celebrity and they deplored the cause of it—­his first novel.

That book justified everything that Jevons had said of it.  It did startle.  It did arrest.  It was unpleasant.  So vividly and powerfully unpleasant that it nailed your eyes to it and kept them there.  It made a break and a stain in your memory.

When I say it was unpleasant I mean, and he meant, not that it was unclean, but that it was brutal.  I shall have written this tale to very little purpose if it isn’t transparent that Jevons’s mind, Jevons’s whole nature was scrupulously clean.  Even his brutality was not spontaneous.  He broke his neck to get it.  You could see him putting his tongue out as he laboured the brutality.  You could see him sweating as he went over it again, removing all the marks of labour, making for his effect of sincerity and gorgeous simplicity and ease.

I’ve said it’s doubtful how far Jevons took himself seriously.  He certainly had no illusions as to the nature of his success.  But whenever I come to this side of him I feel myself untrustworthy.  I cannot see him properly.  I am prejudiced by knowing him so well.  I daresay if I hadn’t known him, if he hadn’t been so frank in his disclosures, if he hadn’t explained so many times the deliberate calculations of his method, I should think him a great novelist.  I daresay to a generation that knows nothing about him or his disclosures or his method he will seem a great novelist again.  I daresay he is a great novelist.  I don’t know.

Anyhow there were three great stages in his career:  the Slow Advance; the Grand Attack; and Victory. (He had been advancing slowly ever since the day I met him on the football-ground at Blackheath).