ethod he will seem a great
novelist again. I daresay he _is_ a great novelist. I don't know.

Anyhow there were three great stages in his career: the Slow Advance; the
Grand Attack; and Victory. (He had been advancing slowly ever since the
day I met him on the football-ground at Blackheath).

All these stages are marked for me by the increasing size and splendour
of the houses that he occupied in turn; the four-roomed cottage at
Hampstead; the little house in Edwardes Square; the large house in
Mayfair; the still larger country house he acquired last of all. And the
Jevons I like to think of is the Jevons of the little whitewashed
cottage, of the whitewashed rooms, the one sitting-room where we dined;
the kitchen at the back where we cooked and washed up; the absurd little
bedroom in the front where the four-post bed was set up like a tent with
its curtains and its tester; the study at the back where Jevons worked
and Norah Thesiger slept when she came to stay. I remember Jevons darting
from the kitchen and the dining-room with steaming dishes in his hands;
Jevons with a pipe in his mouth and his feet on the chimney-piece,
talking, talking, talking about anything--Dreadnoughts, submarines, the
War (he had given it nine years now)--from nine till eleven, and then
flinging himself out of his chair to turn the settee into a bed for the
Kiddy. Whatever he was saying or doing, in the middle of a calculation,
he would break off at eleven and drag sheets and blankets out of a
coffin-like box under the settee and make up the Kiddy's little bed for
her, because Kiddies must on no account be allowed to sit up late at
night. I remember Viola and Norah coming in to help and Jevons shooing
them away. And Norah would come back again and put her head round the
door and look at him where he knelt on the floor absurdly, tucking in
blankets and breathing hard as he tucked. And she would say, "Look at
him. Isn't he sweet?" as if Jevons had been a rabbit or a guinea-pig, and
go away again.

Somehow I always see him like that, making beds, stooping over something,
doing something for one of them or for me.

Sometimes they would burst in on him suddenly in his bedmaking and throw
pillows at him, or it might be sponges, and there would be madness: two
girls running amok and little Jevons flying before them through the
house and squealing in his excitement. Once he went out to post a letter
in the Grove before midnight and they locked him o