highest forms of cerebral activity with I don't know what glamour of
romantic adventure.

Her enthusiasm, her veneration for the written word made her an admirable
typist. But not all at once. To say that she brought to her really
horrible task a respect, a meticulous devotion, would give you no idea of
the child's attitude; it was a blind, savage superstition that would have
been exasperating if it had not been so heart-rending. It cleared
gradually until it became intelligent co-operation.

I trained her for six months.

I don't suppose I ever worked harder than I did in that first half year
of her. I mean my output was never greater. For every blessed thing I
wrote was an excuse for going to see her, or for her coming to see me. It
was a perpetual journeying between my rooms in Brunswick Square, and her
rooms in Hampstead overlooking the Heath. The more I wrote the more I saw
of her.

I trained her for six months--until Jevons was ready for her.

When I tell you that she reverenced my performances you may imagine in
what spirit she approached his.

For their meeting, as for what happened afterwards, I alone am
responsible. I brought it on myself. By sheer quixotic fuss and
interference with what, after all, wasn't my affair. For little Jevons
most decidedly was not. I might easily have let that sleeping dog lie. He
certainly did sleep, in some obscure kennel of London; he had slept ever
since I had left him at the door of that restaurant in Soho. He slept
almost for the six months he had then given himself.

And then, before (according to his own schedule) he was quite due, he
appeared in the columns (in my columns) of the _Morning Standard_. I had
almost forgotten his existence; but when I saw his name, James Tasker
Jevons, stick out familiarly under the big headlines, I remembered that
that name, on a card with an address, had been lying in my left-hand
writing-table drawer all this time; I remembered that it was there
because he had lent me half a crown, and that I had never paid him.
Then he came back to me--he lived again.

I sent him a postal order and an apology. I referred, very handsomely as
I thought, to his cuckoo's nesting in my paper. (I informed him, in fact,
that he "did it" better than I did); and because I had worked myself up
to a pitch of affability and generosity, I asked him to come and see me
at such time as he should be free. And because, also, I was indifferent
and lazy and didn't wan