“Don’t you see now,” she said, “why I went out to him, and how beautiful it all was?”

I asked her did she think I’d ever doubted?  She said:  “No.  But Daddy hates the book.  So does Mummy.  They all hate it except Norah and me.  I’m glad he wrote it.  I’m glad he put me into it.  I never knew I was so nice, did you?”

“Oh, come,” I said, “surely I always knew?”

But she didn’t pay any attention to me.  She didn’t care to know what I thought or what I knew.  She wasn’t thinking of me or of herself.  She was defending Jimmy with little jerky, stabbing thrusts of defiance.  You could see that the smallest criticism of him made her suffer; that she was capable of infinite suffering where Jimmy was concerned.  Also you saw that she would have to suffer, and that she knew it, and that it was this suffering that she repulsed and thrust from her with her stabs.  He was making a tender place in her mind that might some day become a wound.

“You know I did,” I insisted—­I think, to turn her mind from him.

She looked at me gravely before she smiled.

“Nobody but Jimmy really thinks me nice.  Nobody but Jimmy knows how nice I am.”

And then she showed me the house.

I praised some detail that Jevons had devised (not that there was much detail; it was all extremely simple).  And I believe she saw criticism of Jimmy in that.

“I know it looks as if he cared a lot about this sort of thing.  And I daresay you think it’s silly of him.  But he doesn’t really care.”

“It certainly looks,” I said, “as if he cared about something.”

“It’s me he cares about,” she said.

“And do you care about—­this sort of thing, Viola?”

“I care about his caring.  But I was every bit as happy in that little four-roomed house, if that’s what you mean.”

“Aren’t you glad to have more room to move about in?”

“I’m glad to have room for Daddy and Mummy when they come to stay.”

It was as if she had said, “If you think I’m glad to have room to get away from him you’re mistaken.”

And there was another impression that she gave me.  It was also as if she wanted to warn me not to form the habit of coming to see her when she was alone.  I should gain nothing by it.  If I insisted on seeing her alone I should get Jimmy, Jimmy, all the time.

I didn’t try to see her again alone.

But I saw her often.  Jevons was always asking me there.  He made a point of it whenever they had what Viola called “anybody interesting.”  By this she meant somebody belonging to the confraternity of letters.  Jevons had a sort of idea that I liked meeting these people and that it did me good.  The house in Edwardes Square might have become a haunt of Jimmy’s confreres if Jimmy had had time to attend to them and if he hadn’t been so deliberately exclusive.  He was trying for the best—­not for the great names so much as for the great achievements, and they were few.  And there were one or two of them who rejected Jevons.