tion on himself. He hadn't been six weeks in the county before
he had become the most conspicuous object in it.

I don't know how he did it; you never really caught him at it; and yet,
when you came down to stay with him, you felt all the time that he was
doing it; you felt a sort of shame (a shame that he couldn't feel) in
seeing that he did it so perpetually and so well. He had a way of making
his privacy a public thing. There was something positively indecent in
his detachment; it advertised him as no possible immersion could have
done. I've seen him lying out on his moor basking all by himself in the
sun; I've seen him meditating all by himself in his pinewood; I've seen
him sitting in his walled garden, with the apparatus of his business all
about him, when you would have said that if ever a man's life was hidden
and withdrawn it was Tasker Jevons's. And yet it wasn't. You knew it
wasn't; and he knew that you knew. He knew that his gardener and his
chauffeur and his butler and his cook and his housemaid and his
parlourmaid knew that he was sitting in his garden writing, or meditating
in his pinewood or basking on his moor in the sun, and that their
knowledge penetrated to every house in the village, to every house in the
county within a radius of twenty miles. And when he was not doing any of
these prominently tranquil things he was tearing about the country in his
motor-car.

I have never seen anything like Jevons's motoring. It was in this new
aspect of his that he was, I think, most remarkable. I say he made his
privacy a public thing; but in the furious publicity of his motoring it
was the other way round. He turned the public roads into a private track
through paradise. I do not mean that he was a road-hog; far from it. He
had the most exquisite manners of the road, He would slow down for a hen
in the distance and upset himself into the ditch to avoid a rabbit. I
have known him (with his first car) give a lift to any filthy tramp
between Midhurst and Portsmouth. I mean that the act of motoring
transported him; and he did these things instinctively, mechanically,
without interruption to his rapture. Speed and the wind of speed, the air
rushing by like a water-race as he ripped through it, the streaming past
him of trees and hedges, the humming and throbbing of his engines, were
ecstasy to Jimmy. He had learned to drive the thing, and his sense of
power over it gave him the physical exaltation that he craved for