But a week later—the week before Easter—he came to us suddenly in my rooms where Viola was correcting proofs for me.
He had come to tell us of his good luck. His novel had been accepted.
I was glad, of course. But Viola was more than glad. She was excited, agitated. She jumped up and said: "Oh, Jimmy!" (She called him Jimmy, and her voice told me that it was not for the first time.) "Jimmy! How simply spiffing!"
And I saw him look at her with a grave and tender assurance, as a man looks at the woman he loves when he knows that the hour of his triumph is her hour.
And I thought even then: It's nothing. It's only that she's glad the poor chap has pulled it off.
Then she said: "Let's all go and dine somewhere together. You don't mind,
Furny dear, do you? I'll take it home and sit up with it."
Oh, I didn't mind. We all went somewhere and dined together. We went, for the sheer appropriateness of it, to that restaurant in Soho where I had dined with Jevons for the first time. That was how it happened—what did happen, I mean, afterwards, in my rooms where Jevons had left us.
We had gone back there for coffee and cigarettes. (Canterbury wouldn't have approved of this.)
He had said good night to us when he turned on the threshold with his reminiscence. The restaurant in Soho had aroused it.
"I say, Furnival, do you remember that half-crown you borrowed from me?"