l
you, my son, you've been guided and guarded. Why, you didn't even see
that the child was grown up till I drew your attention to it."

There was no use pretending I liked it. I didn't.

I said, "Thank you. If a thing comes off it's your doing, and if it
doesn't it's mine."

He said it looked like that.

When I saw Norah in the morning she asked me whether Jimmy had said he
knew it was coming?

I said he had.

"And I suppose he thinks he made it come?"

That, I said, was Jimmy's attitude.

"Well, then," she said, "he didn't. You don't believe him, do you?"

Did I? Not perhaps at the moment, and never at any time as Jimmy believed
it himself. But I do think he meant it to happen. It was one of the moves
in his difficult game. He couldn't afford to neglect any means of
strengthening his position in his wife's family. When it came to
acknowledging Jimmy his wife's family was divided. Portions of it,
strange cousins whom I never met till after my marriage, refused to
acknowledge him at all. At Lancaster Gate he was received coldly in
accordance with the discreet policy by which the Thesigers had avoided
the appearances of scandal. Down at Canterbury there were degrees and
shades of recognition. Norah openly loved him. The Canon had what he
called "a morbid liking for the fellow." Mildred and Victoria tolerated
him. Millicent endured him as an infliction. Mrs. Thesiger concealed
under the most beautiful manners and the most Christian charity an
inveterate repugnance.

I have forgotten Bertie. Bertie, who could generally be found at
Lancaster Gate when he wasn't in his chambers in the Temple, was
apathetic and amiably evasive. He took the line that Lancaster Gate took
when he referred to his brother-in-law as a clever little beast.

And to all these shades Jevons was acutely sensitive.

I have known men (they were of the confraternity of letters) who declared
that they could not understand why a man like Jevons, in Jevons's
position, should have bothered his head for two minutes about his wife's
family. They considered that Jevons's marriage was a disaster, not for
the Thesigers, but for Jevons, and that his only safe and proper course
was to leave the Thesigers alone. But it wasn't so easy to leave them
alone when he had married into them; and to have left them would have
been for Jevons a confession of failure. He might just as well have laid
down his arms or pulled down the shutters of his shop. From the ver