All these stages are marked for me by the increasing size and splendour of the houses that he occupied in turn; the four-roomed cottage at Hampstead; the little house in Edwardes Square; the large house in Mayfair; the still larger country house he acquired last of all.  And the Jevons I like to think of is the Jevons of the little whitewashed cottage, of the whitewashed rooms, the one sitting-room where we dined; the kitchen at the back where we cooked and washed up; the absurd little bedroom in the front where the four-post bed was set up like a tent with its curtains and its tester; the study at the back where Jevons worked and Norah Thesiger slept when she came to stay.  I remember Jevons darting from the kitchen and the dining-room with steaming dishes in his hands; Jevons with a pipe in his mouth and his feet on the chimney-piece, talking, talking, talking about anything—­Dreadnoughts, submarines, the War (he had given it nine years now)—­from nine till eleven, and then flinging himself out of his chair to turn the settee into a bed for the Kiddy.  Whatever he was saying or doing, in the middle of a calculation, he would break off at eleven and drag sheets and blankets out of a coffin-like box under the settee and make up the Kiddy’s little bed for her, because Kiddies must on no account be allowed to sit up late at night.  I remember Viola and Norah coming in to help and Jevons shooing them away.  And Norah would come back again and put her head round the door and look at him where he knelt on the floor absurdly, tucking in blankets and breathing hard as he tucked.  And she would say, “Look at him.  Isn’t he sweet?” as if Jevons had been a rabbit or a guinea-pig, and go away again.

Somehow I always see him like that, making beds, stooping over something, doing something for one of them or for me.

Sometimes they would burst in on him suddenly in his bedmaking and throw pillows at him, or it might be sponges, and there would be madness:  two girls running amok and little Jevons flying before them through the house and squealing in his excitement.  Once he went out to post a letter in the Grove before midnight and they locked him out and looked at him from the window of the front bedroom and defied him to enter, and he skipped round to the back and climbed up by the water-butt on to the drainpipe of the bathroom, and from the drainpipe, perilously, in through the window of his study, where they found him putting hair-brushes in Norah’s bed.

After the drainpipe adventure (when they saw how game he was) they sobered down.  I think it was that night that Norah said, “We mustn’t kill Jimmy.  That would never do.”

And there would be theatre-parties when Jimmy had tickets given him, and eighteenpenny dinners at the “Petit Riche,” going and returning by the Hampstead Tube.