"Please don't, Norah. It's really awful for poor Jimmy now he's on all the buses and in the Tube?"
She referred to the monstrous posters that advertised his play in black letters eighteen inches high on a scarlet ground.
"How do you feel when you're in the Tube?" said Norah.
"You feel," said Jimmy—he was sitting in one of his worst attitudes, with his legs stretched straight out before him and his feet tilted toes upwards. I noticed that Reggie couldn't bear to look at him—"you feel first of all as if everybody was looking at you; you feel a silly ass; then you feel as if everybody was looking at the posters; then you know they aren't looking at them. Then you leave off looking at them yourself. And if one does hit you in the eye you feel as if it referred to somebody else, and after that you don't feel anything more."
It wasn't brilliant, but the wonder was he found anything to say at all.
I was thankful when Pavitt came in to tell us that dinner was served. It delivered us from Jimmy's attitudes.
When it came to dining at our small round table we saw how badly we had erred in not asking anybody else but Viola and Jimmy. A sixth, a woman (almost any woman would have done in the circumstances), a woman to talk to Reggie might have pulled us through. But with Reggie sitting beside Viola, with Jimmy opposite them by himself between me and Norah (the only possible arrangement) it was terrible.
Reggie persisted in talking to Viola like a well-bred stranger. He persisted in ignoring Jevons.
And Jimmy retaliated by ignoring him. There was nothing else for him to do. Only it wasn't one of the things he did well. Beside Reggie's accomplishment he looked mean and pitiful and a little vulgar. God forgive me for putting it down, but that is how he looked.
And once or twice, under the strain of it, he dropped an aitch with the most disconcerting effect.