I didn't try to see her again alone.
But I saw her often. Jevons was always asking me there. He made a point of it whenever they had what Viola called "anybody interesting." By this she meant somebody belonging to the confraternity of letters. Jevons had a sort of idea that I liked meeting these people and that it did me good. The house in Edwardes Square might have become a haunt of Jimmy's confréres if Jimmy had had time to attend to them and if he hadn't been so deliberately exclusive. He was trying for the best—not for the great names so much as for the great achievements, and they were few. And there were one or two of them who rejected Jevons.
And then you had to reckon with Mrs. Jevons's rejections. She was as fastidious in her way as he was in his; and besides, she guarded him, so that the circle around him was rather tight and small.
Oh, he was faithful; he kept me in it; he gave me of his best; and if he could have made me shine I should have blazed among them all.
It doesn't matter now which of them I met there. Jevons was charming to them all. He set them blazing. I don't think he cared much whether he blazed or not, but if he felt like it he could make a bigger blaze than any of them. He enjoyed them; he enjoyed them vastly, violently. Having once acquired the taste, he couldn't have lived without the intellectual excitement they gave him. But except for that, for the stimulus, the release of energy, it's surprising how little they really counted for him.
And so it's not those evenings and that brilliance that I remember.
In the house in Edwardes Square I seem to have been always meeting Norah Thesiger. Now that they had a room to put her in, she would be there for months at a time. And whenever she was there they would be sure to ask me. If Jevons didn't, Viola did.
There was that summer, too, when Norah and Mildred came together with Charlie Thesiger, their cousin, who was engaged to Mildred. Charlie was then a lieutenant in the South Kent Hussars. He was a large young man, correct, handsome, rather supercilious and rather stupid. He seemed to fill the house in Edwardes Square when he was in it.
He doesn't matter. At least, he didn't matter then. God knows he never really mattered, poor boy, at any time. But he is important. He fixes things for me. He brings me to the incident of June, nineteen-nine.
It was a very slight incident. It wouldn't be worth recording except that it stood for others like itself, a whole crowd. And it was of such slight things that Viola's torments were to be made.