"And Viola?" I said. "Is she going too?"
"No. Viola's going to stay till our week's up. By that time she'll be bored stiff and longing to get back to me."
* * * * *
He went, and I'm not at all sure that he didn't score by going.
And that night and the next and the next I thought of little Jevons alone in his little house in Hampstead, lying all by himself in his four-post bed between his rosebud chintz curtains and under his rosebud chintz tester, and saying to himself that he had scored.
VII
The Thesigers lived to be grateful to me for reconciling them to Jevons, if it was I who reconciled them. I don't think Mrs. Thesiger ever really forgave him, ever really liked him till the end; but the Canon very soon owned to a surreptitious regard for him. Luckily he acquired it while Jevons was still struggling, otherwise I do not think I could have saved their faces.
In the first year of his marriage Jevons made them see how right I was when I told them it would be impossible to ignore him. In the second year they saw that he had only just given them time to come round before it was too late. The minute he became prosperous it would have been too late, much too late for their dignity and beauty. And yet they couldn't very well have gone on repudiating Viola for ever. A year would have seen them through that attitude. And Jevons's great coup had come off in the year he "gave" it; so that if they had been left to themselves their revulsion of tenderness must have coincided with his prosperity. They would have had every appearance of having surrendered to his income.
And they would have missed the spectacle of his struggle.
I believe it was his struggle, the doggedness, the heroism, the wild humour that he put into it that brought them round. They didn't like his early celebrity and they deplored the cause of it—his first novel.