And yet in a party of the confraternity you were not aware of him like this.  For then he blazed; and in the flare he made you didn’t notice whether he tilted his soup-plate the right way or not, or care if he couldn’t use his table napkin or his pocket-handkerchief and look you square in the face at the same time.  Neither did you notice these things if you were alone with him or if only Norah and Viola were there.  He was happy with us, and happiness was becoming to him, and he had all sorts of endearing ways that would have disarmed us.  And then there’s no doubt that Viola protected him.  She watched over him; she smoothed his social path for him; she removed his worst pitfalls; she ran, as it were, to pick him up before he fell.  He didn’t know she was watching him; neither, I think, did she.  It was a blind instinct with her to help him.  And Norah and I helped him too.  And as he wasn’t nervous with us everything went well.  But when strangers got into our party it was different.  Viola couldn’t attend to him properly; and if the stranger happened to be rather stupid, like Charlie Thesiger, Jevons didn’t blaze and so cover himself; he got bored; and when he was bored he got jumpy; and it was when he got jumpy that he did things.

And Charlie was getting on his nerves.

Still, everything went well until the table was cleared for dessert; and there was no reason why everything shouldn’t have gone well even then.  Viola had guarded against his most inveterate failing—­a habit of stretching for things across the table—­by putting everything he wanted within his reach.  Within Jevons’s reach to-night was a little dish containing among other things chocolate nougat.  And he was fond of nougat.  He was fond also of chaffing Norah.  And he was not prepared to forego one amusement for the other.  And Norah had taken a mean advantage of him.  She had timed a provocation at the moment when for any other man retort would have been impossible; and she hadn’t reckoned with Jevons’s ingenuity of resource.

I am not going to say what he did.  It wouldn’t be fair to him.  It was a little thing, but you couldn’t pretend for one moment that you hadn’t seen it, any more than Jevons could do anything to cover the fantastic horror of it.  We simply sat and stiffened; all but Norah, who burst out laughing in Jimmy’s face.

Mildred, trying to help him, made matters worse by asking for a peach when she had got a large one on her plate.  Charlie Thesiger looked down his nose.  I don’t know where I looked, but I know that I was conscious of Viola’s face and of the flush that darkened it to the tip of her chin and the roots of her hair.  And I could feel the shudder down her back passing into mine.

After all, Viola did cover it.  She lit a little Roman lamp they had and sent it travelling down the table with the cigarette-box.  Then she got up and went to Jevons and stooped over his shoulder and took the little dish from him.