“Between us,” she says, “we might manage it.  But if you’re left to yourself you’ll make him all nougat.”

When I retort that if she were left to herself she’d eliminate the very things that make him the engaging animal he is, and remind her that a straw will show the way the wind’s blowing, she asks me, “Did any big wind ever blow a straw before it all the way?”

Well, perhaps I am the very last person—­he made me the last person by what he did to me—­but when it comes to exaggeration I haven’t attached more importance to the Nougat Incident than Jevons did himself.  Why, when he shut himself up in his study that night, instead of hurling himself forward in the Grand Attack, he must have sat with his head in his hands brooding over it and wondering what he’d done; he must have gone straight upstairs to ask Viola what he’d done, or there’d have been no earthly sense in what we heard her saying.  The detail may have been small, but it was not inessential when it could turn Tasker Jevons from the Grand Attack as he was turned that night.

I tell you, and Jevons would tell you, it is of such small things that tragedies are made—­the bitterest, the most insidious.

And when Jevons did finally hurl himself, when he shut himself up, morning after morning and night after night, to labour violently on his greatest work, though (for just as long as he was actually engaged) he might be staving off his tragedy, he was nevertheless precipitating the event.  You may say that when you get him there in his study on his battlefield you are among the big forces at once; but the interesting thing is that those big forces by their very expenditure released a whole crowd of little, infinitely little ones that, in their turn, in their miniature explosion, worked for his destruction.  Jevons, struggling with his social disabilities, was like a giant devoured by microscopically minute organisms over whose generation he had no control.

And the greater the man, mind you, the greater the tragedy.

Still, for those two years in Edwardes Square, he staved it off.  It was the very violence of his labour, the prodigious front of the battle he delivered, that saved him.  Then there was his victory, his Third Novel, that for the time threw all minor happenings into the background.

He was right again in his forecast.  It was his best work, and (I use his own phrase) it did the trick.

When it came, the Grand Attack (which was bolder even than his first assault) carried, you may say, the whole position, after demolishing at one stroke the enemy’s defences.  For he had enemies.  He was the sort of man who does have them.  He didn’t make them, at least, not deliberately, he couldn’t have been bothered to make them; but he drew them; they seemed to rise out of the ground after every one of his appearances.

Well, they couldn’t say he hadn’t done it this time.