ut and looked at him
from the window of the front bedroom and defied him to enter, and he
skipped round to the back and climbed up by the water-butt on to the
drainpipe of the bathroom, and from the drainpipe, perilously, in through
the window of his study, where they found him putting hair-brushes in
Norah's bed.

After the drainpipe adventure (when they saw how game he was) they
sobered down. I think it was that night that Norah said, "We mustn't
_kill_ Jimmy. That would never do."

And there would be theatre-parties when Jimmy had tickets given him, and
eighteenpenny dinners at the "Petit Riche," going and returning by the
Hampstead Tube.

It seems to me that Norah must have stayed a great deal with them at
Hampstead, and yet she couldn't have; they were only two years in the
little four-roomed house. Anyhow, we were all immensely happy in those
two years; even I was happy. Jevons I know was--and Viola. Viola had
never been so happy in her life. She cooked: she washed up with Jimmy to
help her; she mended his clothes and made her own; she did his
typewriting; she took down his articles in shorthand and typed them; and
through all his funny little social lapses she adored him.

When you think of it, poverty and close quarters for two years, and the
menace of some of those lapses hanging over her all the time--it was a
pretty severe test. You would have said that if she could stand that she
could stand anything, and she certainly stood it.

But Jimmy hadn't begun yet to unbend. He was still on the defensive,
holding himself in, every nerve strung up to the Grand Attack. This
tension affected his behaviour. He knew his danger. He knew there were
certain gestures that he must restrain, and he restrained them; there
were certain things he did with spoons and forks and table napkins that
would wreck him if he were caught doing them, and in those two years he
kept a very sharp look-out. You would have thought that this life, on the
edge of an abyss, with full knowledge of his danger, would have made him
nervous and produced the very disaster that he dreaded. But no. Jevons
was a fighting man, and he rose to these crises and prevailed. You felt
that for him the real test would come when he was prosperous, when the
strain was taken off him and he let himself go.

Meanwhile it was terrifying to see him balancing himself on the edge.

* * * * *

They moved into the Edwardes Square house i