nd I settled it.

Having settled it, I sent Pavitt, my man, to get rooms for her that
afternoon in Hampstead, with his sister-in-law, in a house overlooking
the Heath. I said I couldn't promise her chintz curtains and a green door
and an orange Angora cat with green eyes, but I thought she would be
fairly comfortable with Mrs. Pavitt.

She was.

She told me a week later that the Hampstead rooms _had_ chintz curtains
and there was a Persian kitten too. A blue Persian, with yellow eyes.

There was. But I didn't tell her who put them there.

The kitten alone (it was a pure-bred Persian) cost me three guineas; and
to this day she thinks that Pavitt, who brought it to her, found it on
the Heath.

Yet, with all my precautions, there was trouble when Canterbury heard
about my typist. (She had become my typist, though I had never said a
word about engaging her.)

This, of course, was owing to the criminal secrecy with which Viola
conducted her affairs. The Minor Canon wrote to me as if I had seduced,
or was about to seduce, his daughter. (He had upset himself by rushing up
to take her back to Canterbury, and finding that she wouldn't go with
him.) I think, in his excitement, he ordered me to give her up. He was a
guileless and indeed a holy man; and it's always the guileless and the
holy people who raise the uncleanest scandals. And Mrs. Thesiger wrote,
and the General and the Dean; and I've no doubt the Archbishop would have
written too, if I hadn't unearthed _my_ General at his club, and asked
him if he knew the Thesigers, and found out that he did, and implored him
to arrange the horrid business for me as best he could. I said he might
tell them that if the girl had been left to them to look after her, she
would have got into rooms in--I named the street, and testified to the
sinister character of the house. And my General wrote and explained to
the other General and to the Minor Canon what a thoroughly nice chap I
was, and how lamentably they had misunderstood what I believed he was
pleased to call my relations with Miss Thesiger. I'm not at all sure that
he didn't even go farther and stick in a lot about my family, and suggest
that I was eligible to the extent that, though my fortunes were still
to make, I had (besides private means that enabled me to live in spite of
journalism) considerable expectations (he knew an aunt of mine--better,
it would seem, than I did). In short, that I was a thoroughly nice chap,
and