It seems to me that Norah must have stayed a great deal with them at Hampstead, and yet she couldn’t have; they were only two years in the little four-roomed house.  Anyhow, we were all immensely happy in those two years; even I was happy.  Jevons I know was—­and Viola.  Viola had never been so happy in her life.  She cooked:  she washed up with Jimmy to help her; she mended his clothes and made her own; she did his typewriting; she took down his articles in shorthand and typed them; and through all his funny little social lapses she adored him.

When you think of it, poverty and close quarters for two years, and the menace of some of those lapses hanging over her all the time—­it was a pretty severe test.  You would have said that if she could stand that she could stand anything, and she certainly stood it.

But Jimmy hadn’t begun yet to unbend.  He was still on the defensive, holding himself in, every nerve strung up to the Grand Attack.  This tension affected his behaviour.  He knew his danger.  He knew there were certain gestures that he must restrain, and he restrained them; there were certain things he did with spoons and forks and table napkins that would wreck him if he were caught doing them, and in those two years he kept a very sharp look-out.  You would have thought that this life, on the edge of an abyss, with full knowledge of his danger, would have made him nervous and produced the very disaster that he dreaded.  But no.  Jevons was a fighting man, and he rose to these crises and prevailed.  You felt that for him the real test would come when he was prosperous, when the strain was taken off him and he let himself go.

Meanwhile it was terrifying to see him balancing himself on the edge.

* * * * *

They moved into the Edwardes Square house in the September quarter of nineteen-eight.  This was the year of the weeks of consolidation, his second novel and his “Journal,” that were to precede the Grand Attack.  The novel did exactly what he said it would.  It did counteract the effect its predecessor; and the “Journal” gave him a place in Belles-Lettres where he was safe from the legend of his own brutality.

But it strained his relations with the Thesigers for the time being.  The Rosalind of the “Journal” is so obviously Viola, and though he is careful to refer to her as his wife, the book reminded people that they were said to have travelled together before they were married.  Her figure moves through the grey Flemish cities and the grey Flemish landscape with an adorable innocence and naivete, a trifle slenderer and tenderer than the Viola I remember, who always had for me an air of energy and obstinacy and defiance, but for Jevons, perhaps, not more slender or more tender than the Viola he knew.  You couldn’t say she wasn’t charming.  The Canon couldn’t say it; what he did say was that Jevons should have kept her out of it.  Jevons’s defence was that if he had kept her out of it there wouldn’t have been any book.