Done it.  There’s no good trying to express such a phenomenon as Jevons in terms of literature.  You can only think about him in terms of action, every book of his being an onslaught by which he laid his public low.

And this time he had conquered America.

Don’t ask me how many thousands he made by it.  I’ve forgotten.  They’ve melted into the tens of thousands that he made before he had finished.  Even in the years of the Grand Attack he was making his old father an allowance and investing large sums in case of accidents. (He had been putting by even in the Hampstead days.) How he did it I can’t think, though he has tried to explain it to me more than once.  The whole thing for him was as obvious as any business transaction (he had the sort of mind for which business transactions are obvious).  He had studied the public he set out to capture.  He presented the life it knew—­the moving, changing, fantastically adventurous life of the middle classes.  Until Jevons rushed on them and forced their eyes open, you may say at the point of the bayonet, the middle classes didn’t know they were moving and changing and being adventurous.  Nobody knew.  It was Jevons’s discovery.

Then, as he pointed out, there were innumerable discretions in his valour.  He knew to a hairbreadth how far he might go, and he went no farther.  He respected existing prejudices because they existed.  He didn’t ask awkward questions; he didn’t raise problems; he had the British capacity for doing serious things with an air of not taking himself seriously and frivolous things with an astounding gravity.

“You can do anything, Furnival,” he said, “if you’re only funny enough.”

Norah tells me that that really is his secret.

But, he said, the whole thing was as calculable as any successful deal on the Stock Exchange.  When you asked him:  “Then why can’t other people do it?” he said:  “God knows why.  They must be precious fools if they want to do it and don’t find out how. I’ve had to find out.”

For one year—­the last year in Edwardes Square—­he enjoyed pure fame.  And he did enjoy it—­I think he enjoyed everything—­like a child with a mechanical toy, or a girl with a new gown, playing with it and trying it on by snatches when he could spare half an hour from his appalling toil.

Heavens, how he worked that year!  With a hard, punctual passion, a multiplied energy, like five financiers engaged on five separate transactions.  After victory in the campaign he had settled down to business and the works of peace.  There was the business of the short story; the business of the monograph; the business of the magazine article and the newspaper column, and the speculations that developed into the immense business of his plays. (I’ve forgotten how much he netted by his first curtain-raiser.) That’s five.