But he never did it again.  Having once for all drawn her portrait as a young girl, he left it, as if he would have kept her youth immortal.  You will not find any woman of his novels who suggests even a fugitive likeness to the Viola he married.

The house in Edwardes Square stands for the second period:  the period of sober energy that led up to the Grand Attack.  It was also the period of deliberate yet vehement refinement.  Jevons was determined at all cost to be refined.  And at considerable cost, with white-painted panelling throughout, with blue-and-white Chinese vases here and there, and more and more Bokhara rugs everywhere, and tussore silk curtains in the windows and every stick of furniture chosen for its premeditated chastity, the little brown house was made to serve him as a holy standard.  He said he had only got to live up to it and he would be all right.

And so, in the quest of purging and salvation through the beauty of his surroundings, he had made his place perfect inside and out, from the diminutive flagged court in the front (with one brilliant mat of flowers laid down in the middle) to the last lovely border of the grass-garden at the back.  I wondered, I have never ceased to wonder, knowing his beginnings, how he did it so well.  Of course he gave Viola a free hand, he let her have what she wanted; but when I complimented her on any result she let me know at once that it was Jimmy’s doing.  She was pathetically anxious that I should see that he knew how.  She let me know, too, the secret of his passionate absorption in gardens and interiors, lest I should think it argued any unmanliness in him.

I remember so well her showing me that house in Edwardes Square.  I had called one afternoon when I had known that Jevons wasn’t there.  I had left him at his club in Dover Street. (He had a club in Dover Street now; it was my club; I had put him up for it.  He enjoyed his club as he enjoyed everything else that he had acquired by conquest; his membership marked another step in his advance, another strip of alien territory gained.  And he had chosen this club, he said, because most of the members had retired, to cultivate adipose tissue on pensions, and they made him feel adolescent and slender and energetic.) I had left him in the library writing letters (he said he found a voluptuous pleasure in writing letters on the club paper under that irreproachable address), and I rushed off in a taxi to Viola in Edwardes Square.

She was very glad to see me, and she gave me tea, poured out of an early eighteenth-century silver teapot, in beautiful old blue-and-white Chinese teacups.  She wore one of those absurd narrow coats with tails that made women look like long, slender birds that year, and she had done something unexpected with her hair; it was curls, curls, curls all over, the way they did it then, and she sat on a wine-coloured sofa with a wine-coloured rug at her feet.

She began straight away by talking about Jimmy’s last book, the “Journal.”