was no break, not even a dividing line.
Compared with what happened then I am compelled to think of Viola's
marriage, not as a risky experiment that had so far defeated prophecy,
but as an entirely serene and happy thing. Between the moment when they
set up that four-post bed in that absurd little house in Hampstead and
the day of their leaving Edwardes Square behind them I cannot point to
any time and say, "That was the beginning of it," or put my finger on an
event and show the difference there.

Unless it was Reggie's coming back.

But the results of that didn't appear till later.

Any difference I may have noted previously was an affair of shades, of
delicate oscillations. There was no lapse without a recovery, no
departure without a return.

And here, at the end of nineteen-ten, I got a line drawn sharply on
either side of a break I cannot bridge. The minute Jimmy moved into that
house in Mayfair things began to go wrong.

It was as if Jimmy, in his love of doing risky things, had cast, this
time, a dreadful die.

From that evening onward I watched them with anxiety. I do not know how
far Jevons was aware that the house in Mayfair was a blunder; I think he
wouldn't have acknowledged that it was a blunder at all. His own attitude
to it was not in the least disturbed by his humorous perception of other
people's. With his dexterity in adjustments he was quite capable of
reconciling them, quite capable of enjoying the effect it had on nervous
organisms while he himself took it seriously. It was, after all, his own
achievement, and a very astonishing achievement too. He continued to
respect it as the immense sign of his material prosperity, the
advertisement, you may say, of his arrival. His business instinct would
never have allowed him to repent of an advertisement.

There _was_ this gross element in his enjoyment.

And there was also the pure and charming happiness of a child that
suddenly finds itself left, with boundless opportunity, to its own
gorgeous caprice. You could no more blame Jevons for the bad taste of his
drawing-room and his Tudor hall than you could blame a child for its
joy in a treasure of tinsel and coloured glass.

But when we asked ourselves where, in this outbreak of Jimmy's fantasy,
did Viola come in, we had to own that she came in nowhere. Not only had
she stood by without lifting a finger to interfere with its tempestuous
course; not only had she submitted without a protest; she see