He seems to me to have been always buying things.  I’ve forgotten most of them except the things he bought for Viola—­the jewellery that frightened her, the opera cloak that made her hysterical, the furs that had to be sent back again (you’d have thought he couldn’t have gone wrong with furs, but he did), and the hats that even Jimmy owned it was impossible to wear.  I can see his face saddened by these failures and a little puzzled, as if he couldn’t conceive how his star should have gone back on him like that.  I can see him, and I can see Viola, kneeling on the floor in his study and packing some beastly thing up in paper, tenderly, as if it had been the corpse of a beloved hope; and I can hear him saying (it was after the opera cloak and the hysterics), “Walter, you can monkey with a woman’s ’eart, and you can ruin her immortal soul, but if you meddle with her clothes it’s hell for both of you.  Don’t you do it, my boy.”

I remember scores of little things like that, things done and things said with an incorruptible sweetness and affection, but things accentuated with lapsed aitches and with gestures that only Jimmy was unaware of.  Those years are marked for me more than anything by the awful increase in his solecisms.  Their number, their enormity and frequency rose with his income, and for the best of reasons.  It was as if, his object being gained, he could afford them.  He was no longer on his guard.  He had no longer any need to be.  The strain was over—­he relaxed, and in relaxation he fell back into his old habits.

All those years we seem to have been looking on at the slow, slow process of his vulgarization.  By nineteen-twelve the confraternity had begun to regard Tasker Jevons as an outrageous joke.  And in nineteen-thirteen, when both his plays were still running, even his father-in-law said that he was a disgusting spectacle.  And Reggie (he was Major Thesiger now, with a garrison appointment at Woolwich) Reggie kept as far away from him as ever.

Sometimes I have thought that Viola’s detachment helped his undoing.  She wasn’t there to pull him up or to cover his disasters; she had more and more the look of not being there at all.

And Charlie Thesiger was always there.  There with a most decided look of being up to something.

Jevons didn’t seem to mind him.  You might have said that Charlie was another of the risks he took.

X

In nineteen-thirteen Jimmy bought a motor-car.

He was more excited about his motor-car than he had been about his house—­any of his houses.  Even Viola was interested and came rushing down from her Belfry when it arrived.

He bought it at the end of January.  A good, useful car that would shut or open and serve for town or country.  But it was no good to them till April.

For all February and March Viola was ill.  She had been running down gradually for about two years, getting a little whiter and a little slenderer every month, and in the first week of February she got influenza and ignored it, and went out for a drive in the motor-car with a temperature of a hundred and four.