ust have sat with his head in his hands
brooding over it and wondering what he'd done; he must have gone straight
upstairs to ask Viola what he'd done, or there'd have been no earthly
sense in what we heard her saying. The detail may have been small, but it
was not inessential when it could turn Tasker Jevons from the Grand
Attack as he was turned that night.

I tell you, and Jevons would tell you, it is of such small things that
tragedies are made--the bitterest, the most insidious.

And when Jevons did finally hurl himself, when he shut himself up,
morning after morning and night after night, to labour violently on his
greatest work, though (for just as long as he was actually engaged) he
might be staving off his tragedy, he was nevertheless precipitating the
event. You may say that when you get him there in his study on his
battlefield you are among the big forces at once; but the interesting
thing is that those big forces by their very expenditure released a whole
crowd of little, infinitely little ones that, in their turn, in their
miniature explosion, worked for his destruction. Jevons, struggling with
his social disabilities, was like a giant devoured by microscopically
minute organisms over whose generation he had no control.

And the greater the man, mind you, the greater the tragedy.

Still, for those two years in Edwardes Square, he staved it off. It was
the very violence of his labour, the prodigious front of the battle he
delivered, that saved him. Then there was his victory, his Third Novel,
that for the time threw all minor happenings into the background.

He was right again in his forecast. It _was_ his best work, and (I use
his own phrase) it did the trick.

When it came, the Grand Attack (which was bolder even than his first
assault) carried, you may say, the whole position, after demolishing at
one stroke the enemy's defences. For he had enemies. He was the sort of
man who does have them. He didn't _make_ them, at least, not
deliberately, he couldn't have been bothered to make them; but he drew
them; they seemed to rise out of the ground after every one of his
appearances.

Well, they couldn't say he hadn't done it this time.

_Done_ it. There's no good trying to express such a phenomenon as Jevons
in terms of literature. You can only think about him in terms of action,
every book of his being an onslaught by which he laid his public low.

And this time he had conquered America.

Don't ask