“Why—­on earth—­should she have wanted that?”

“Well—­because I worried about you, and she wanted me to be happy.  And because she worried about you, and wanted you to be happy.  And because she worried about the Kid, and wanted her to be happy.  And because she wanted the rest of them to be happy too.”

I said I didn’t know what I’d done to be so happy.

“You’ve done nothing.  You don’t owe it to yourself that you’re happy.  My dear fellow, you’ve been watched, and looked after, and protected for three and a half years with an incessant care.  If you’d been left to yourself you’d have bungled the whole business.  Either you wouldn’t have proposed to her at all, or you’d have proposed three times running when it was too late.”

I pointed out to him that I hadn’t proposed three times running, neither was I too late.

“All the same,” he said, “you wouldn’t have thought of it if she hadn’t gone to the Thesigers.  And she wouldn’t have gone to the Thesigers if Viola hadn’t got the Thesigers to ask her.  It was a put-up job.  I tell you, my son, you’ve been guided and guarded.  Why, you didn’t even see that the child was grown up till I drew your attention to it.”

There was no use pretending I liked it.  I didn’t.

I said, “Thank you.  If a thing comes off it’s your doing, and if it doesn’t it’s mine.”

He said it looked like that.

When I saw Norah in the morning she asked me whether Jimmy had said he knew it was coming?

I said he had.

“And I suppose he thinks he made it come?”

That, I said, was Jimmy’s attitude.

“Well, then,” she said, “he didn’t.  You don’t believe him, do you?”

Did I?  Not perhaps at the moment, and never at any time as Jimmy believed it himself.  But I do think he meant it to happen.  It was one of the moves in his difficult game.  He couldn’t afford to neglect any means of strengthening his position in his wife’s family.  When it came to acknowledging Jimmy his wife’s family was divided.  Portions of it, strange cousins whom I never met till after my marriage, refused to acknowledge him at all.  At Lancaster Gate he was received coldly in accordance with the discreet policy by which the Thesigers had avoided the appearances of scandal.  Down at Canterbury there were degrees and shades of recognition.  Norah openly loved him.  The Canon had what he called “a morbid liking for the fellow.”  Mildred and Victoria tolerated him.  Millicent endured him as an infliction.  Mrs. Thesiger concealed under the most beautiful manners and the most Christian charity an inveterate repugnance.

I have forgotten Bertie.  Bertie, who could generally be found at Lancaster Gate when he wasn’t in his chambers in the Temple, was apathetic and amiably evasive.  He took the line that Lancaster Gate took when he referred to his brother-in-law as a clever little beast.

And to all these shades Jevons was acutely sensitive.