As I look back on him he seems to have torn through his stages at an incredible pace.  There are several that I haven’t counted, so suddenly did he leave them behind him:  the stage when he was literary adviser to a firm of publishers, who wouldn’t believe him when he said the thing was calculable; the stage when he ceased to be sub-editor of Sport and became editor, an appointment so lucrative that you may judge the risk he took when he abandoned it.  And in between there was his stage of cruelty, when he did reviewing.  It was a brief stage, but he contrived to strew the field with the reputations he had slaughtered (Viola used to plead with him for certain authors, like Queen Philippa for the burghers of Calais), until his job was taken from him in the interests of humanity.

Now—­I am speaking in the light of my later knowledge—­the first effect of these prodigious and passionate labours was beneficent, and I shouldn’t wonder if Jevons, who had calculated everything to a nicety, hadn’t allowed for this too.  To say nothing of the peculiar purity of his earlier fame, which set him in a place apart and assured beyond all possible depreciation, so long as he elected to stay there, the very conditions of his business saved him.  He enjoyed in those two desperate years the immunities of a recluse.  The results were prominently before the public, but Jimmy wasn’t.  His study was literally his sanctuary.  Sitting there nearly all day and half the night, he was removed from the world’s observation at the precise moment when it became inimical.  I don’t mean the observation of the confraternity of letters, which was and always had been kindly to his personality, and had taken little or no notice of his disabilities; I mean the observation of the world he married into, for which disabilities like Jimmy’s count.

He was also removed from Viola’s observation at a time when I think, almost unconsciously, she was beginning to criticize him.  When he came to her out of his sanctuary he came with its consecration on him.  And then there was the appeal he made to her tenderness.  If the shudders down her back began they were checked by the spectacle of his exhaustion.  She couldn’t shudder at the tired conqueror when he flung himself on the floor beside her and laid his head in her lap.

I’ve seen her with him like that—­once, one evening when Norah was with them, and I had turned in after dinner; it was upstairs in that drawing-room in Edwardes Square that they had made, back and front, in an L. Norah and I were in the long, narrow part at the back; you know how those little town rooms go when they’re knocked into one—­the fireplaces in the same wall and windows opposite each other, so that the back rakes the fireplace end of the front part.

Viola and Jevons were by the fireplace in the front, she in her low chair and he stretched out on the rug at her feet.  And we raked them.

They didn’t know they were observed.  I think they’d made up their minds that when Norah and I were together we couldn’t hear or see anything except ourselves.