t to be seriously bothered with him, instead of
asking him to lunch or dine with me, I said I was generally free myself
between four and five.

Between four and five was an hour when Viola was very apt to come in.

In the instant that followed the posting of that letter I saw what I had
done. And I wrote to him the next day asking him to dinner, in order that
he should not come in between four and five. For some weeks, whenever I
fancied he was about due at four o'clock, I wrote and asked him to
dinner. That was how I fastened him to me. There wasn't any sense in
which he fastened on me. I wasn't by any means his only hope.

I may say at once I was prostrated as any slave before his conversation.

I shall never forget the radiance of his twinkle when he told me he had
been sacked three weeks ago from the sporting paper that had provided him
with his sole visible means of subsistence. It was his blessed (only he
didn't call it blessed) style that had dished him: the suicidal _elan_
that he brought to the business. He was warned, he said. He was aware
that his existence as a reporter hung by the bare thread of statement
(wearing thinner and thinner) on which he weaved his fantastic web. His
editor told him he was engaged to report football, not to play it with
the paper. But he couldn't help it. He had got, he said, the ensanguined
habit. Still, I was not to imagine that he bungled things. He jolly well
knew his way about. In his wildest flights there was a homing impulse; he
was preparing a place for himself all the time (that it happened to be
_my_ place didn't seem to afflict him in the least). Like St. Paul, he
knew how to abound and he knew how to abstain. His abstinence, in fact,
gave the measure of his abundance. He held himself in for five perilous
weeks; and when he let himself rip again it was with a burst that landed
him in the front page of the _Morning Standard_.

What he sketched for me had no resemblance to the career of a peaceful
man of letters. It was a hot race, a combat as bloody (his own word) as
those contests of which he was the delighted eye-witness.

He had come thin and worn out of the struggle, but you gathered that he
had borne himself in it with coolness and deliberate caution. His phrases
produced a false effect of vehemence and excitement. You saw that he had
simply followed out a calculated scheme, not one step of which had
miscarried. And you felt that his most passionate affairs would