n the September quarter
of nineteen-eight. This was the year of the weeks of consolidation,
his second novel and his "Journal," that were to precede the Grand
Attack. The novel did exactly what he said it would. It did counteract
the effect its predecessor; and the "Journal" gave him a place in
_Belles-Lettres_ where he was safe from the legend of his own brutality.

But it strained his relations with the Thesigers for the time being. The
Rosalind of the "Journal" is so obviously Viola, and though he is careful
to refer to her as his wife, the book reminded people that they were said
to have travelled together before they were married. Her figure moves
through the grey Flemish cities and the grey Flemish landscape with an
adorable innocence and naivete, a trifle slenderer and tenderer than the
Viola I remember, who always had for me an air of energy and obstinacy
and defiance, but for Jevons, perhaps, not more slender or more tender
than the Viola he knew. You couldn't say she wasn't charming. The Canon
couldn't say it; what he did say was that Jevons should have kept her out
of it. Jevons's defence was that if he had kept her out of it there
wouldn't have been any book.

But he never did it again. Having once for all drawn her portrait as a
young girl, he left it, as if he would have kept her youth immortal. You
will not find any woman of his novels who suggests even a fugitive
likeness to the Viola he married.

The house in Edwardes Square stands for the second period: the period of
sober energy that led up to the Grand Attack. It was also the period of
deliberate yet vehement refinement. Jevons was determined at all cost to
be refined. And at considerable cost, with white-painted panelling
throughout, with blue-and-white Chinese vases here and there, and more
and more Bokhara rugs everywhere, and tussore silk curtains in the
windows and every stick of furniture chosen for its premeditated
chastity, the little brown house was made to serve him as a holy
standard. He said he had only got to live up to it and he would be all
right.

And so, in the quest of purging and salvation through the beauty of his
surroundings, he had made his place perfect inside and out, from the
diminutive flagged court in the front (with one brilliant mat of flowers
laid down in the middle) to the last lovely border of the grass-garden at
the back. I wondered, I have never ceased to wonder, knowing his
beginnings, how he did it so well. Of