You see I looked on Viola and Viola's behaviour as infinitely more my concern than his. I found myself replying for her as she would have wished me to reply, as if I could claim an intenser appreciation of her motives than was his, as if she and I were agreed about this question of helping Tasker Jevons and I were the custodian of her generosity.
He said he supposed it wouldn't hurt him to leave it at that. It wasn't as if it wouldn't be all one in the long run. He gave himself three months.
I supposed he meant to pay her in.
Three weeks later I heard that Jevons was actually living up in Hampstead in the same house as Viola. I didn't hear it from Viola, but from my man, Pavitt, who had it from his sister-in-law. And what Pavitt came to tell me was that Mr. Jevons had been ill.
I went up to Hampstead that afternoon to see him.
I found him in a back room, at the top of the house, sitting by the fire in an easy-chair, wrapped in a blanket. He was as thin as a lath and his face was a bright yellow. The very whites of his eyes were yellow. I would have said you never saw a more miserable object, but that Jevons was not miserable. He was happy. And as far as his devastated condition would allow him, he looked happy. This face, yellow with jaundice, was doing its best to smile. The smile was a grimace, not an affair of the lips at all, but of the deep crescent lines drawn at right angles to them. Still, he was smiling. In a sort of ecstasy.
He was smiling at Viola, who sat in the chair facing him on the other side of the hearth. She looked as if she had been there for ages. Also, as if she had been sitting up all night.
She was smiling too, straight at Jevons. What I saw was the beatitude of his response.
He tried to smile at me, too, as I came in, but the effort was a failure.
He wasn't really a bit glad to see me. Viola got up and left me with him.
I wasn't to stay with him for more than ten minutes, she said. It was the
first day he had been allowed to sit up.
I sat with him for fifteen minutes.