I have known men (they were of the confraternity of letters) who declared that they could not understand why a man like Jevons, in Jevons’s position, should have bothered his head for two minutes about his wife’s family.  They considered that Jevons’s marriage was a disaster, not for the Thesigers, but for Jevons, and that his only safe and proper course was to leave the Thesigers alone.  But it wasn’t so easy to leave them alone when he had married into them; and to have left them would have been for Jevons a confession of failure.  He might just as well have laid down his arms or pulled down the shutters of his shop.  From the very beginning, ever since the day when he had met Reggie Thesiger, he conceived that the whole world of Thesigers had challenged him to hold his own in it, and he was too stubborn a fighter to retire on a challenge.  Besides, he couldn’t have retracted without taking Viola with him.

And you must remember that he was thirty-two when he married her, and that he had behind him an unknown history of struggle and humiliation and defeat.  The Thesigers stood for the whole world of things that he had missed, the world of admired refinements and beautiful amenities, that, without abating one atom of its refinement and amenity, had persistently kicked him out.  Besides—­and this was the pathetic part of it—­he had an irrepressible affection for the Canterbury Thesigers, and it hungered and thirsted for recognition.  It nourished itself in secret on any scraps that came its way.  He met tolerance with grace, and any sort of kindness with passionate gratitude.  I think he would have broken his neck to give Norah or the Canon or even Mrs. Thesiger anything they wanted.  And the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger wanted Norah to marry me.  It wouldn’t become me to say what Norah wanted.

Viola, in a serious moment, threw a light on it. (I had been dining in Edwardes Square on the evening of the day I came back from Canterbury after taking Norah down there.)

“I suppose you don’t know,” she said, “that Mummy and Daddy fell in love with you first?  Well, they did.  They wanted you to marry me to keep me out of mischief, but more than anything they wanted you to marry Norah.  You see, she’s their favourite.”

And it seemed there was even more in it than that.  They wanted to keep Norah out of mischief too.  “Not,” she said, “that Norah would ever have run off to Belgium, even with you.”  But that little adventure of Viola’s had made them nervous.  Norah was inclined to look down on the garrison; like Viola, she had declared in the most decided manner that she meant to strike out a line for herself; she wasn’t going to follow Dorothy’s and Gwinny’s lead (did I say that the two married sisters lived abroad at their husbands’ stations—­Gwinny at Gibraltar, and Dorothy at Simla?), and that for lack of originality Mildred’s engagement to Charlie Thesiger was “the limit.”

“It’s a good thing, Wally,” she said.  “It’ll knit us all tighter together.  That’s partly why we’ve wanted it so awfully.  Do you know that if it hadn’t been for you Norah wouldn’t have been allowed to come and stay with us?”