I've forgotten how much he
netted by his first curtain-raiser.) That's five.

As I look back on him he seems to have torn through his stages at an
incredible pace. There are several that I haven't counted, so suddenly
did he leave them behind him: the stage when he was literary adviser to a
firm of publishers, who wouldn't believe him when he said the thing was
calculable; the stage when he ceased to be sub-editor of _Sport_ and
became editor, an appointment so lucrative that you may judge the risk he
took when he abandoned it. And in between there was his stage of cruelty,
when he did reviewing. It was a brief stage, but he contrived to strew
the field with the reputations he had slaughtered (Viola used to plead
with him for certain authors, like Queen Philippa for the burghers of
Calais), until his job was taken from him in the interests of humanity.

Now--I am speaking in the light of my later knowledge--the first effect
of these prodigious and passionate labours was beneficent, and I
shouldn't wonder if Jevons, who had calculated everything to a nicety,
hadn't allowed for this too. To say nothing of the peculiar purity of his
earlier fame, which set him in a place apart and assured beyond all
possible depreciation, so long as he elected to stay there, the very
conditions of his business saved him. He enjoyed in those two desperate
years the immunities of a recluse. The results were prominently before
the public, but Jimmy wasn't. His study was literally his sanctuary.
Sitting there nearly all day and half the night, he was removed from the
world's observation at the precise moment when it became inimical. I
don't mean the observation of the confraternity of letters, which was and
always had been kindly to his personality, and had taken little or no
notice of his disabilities; I mean the observation of the world he
married into, for which disabilities like Jimmy's count.

He was also removed from Viola's observation at a time when I think,
almost unconsciously, she was beginning to criticize him. When he came to
her out of his sanctuary he came with its consecration on him. And then
there was the appeal he made to her tenderness. If the shudders down her
back began they were checked by the spectacle of his exhaustion. She
couldn't shudder at the tired conqueror when he flung himself on the
floor beside her and laid his head in her lap.

I've seen her with him like that--once, one evening when Norah was
with them,