m that way was to be a bit of
a snob herself. She had accused herself of snobbishness long ago, before
she married him, when, in order to marry him, she had burned her boats.

What could she do? She couldn't put her eyes out. But I believe she would
have been grateful to anybody who would have put them out for her.

I can't tell whether she was always unhappy. I rather think she had liked
Amershott, the house and the garden and the pinewood and the bit of moor,
and I am certain that she liked motoring almost as much as Jimmy did at
first. She could even take pleasure in Jimmy's power over the car when
they were alone with it in the open country, when his pleasure had no
taint in it. I've heard her say, when he wanted to run down to Chichester
or Portsmouth, "Oh, for Heaven's sake, let's go somewhere where nobody
can look at us!"

She must have regarded the open country as the last refuge of his
innocence. For her, more than for any of us, he had lost it.

* * * * *

How far he really lost it we shall never know. Even now, with all my
lights, with that intense country light fairly beating on him, I can
wonder: Am I saying these things because I think them? Or because I
believe I must have thought them then? And I cannot answer my own wonder.
I remember how at Amershott, when I sat beside him in that car of his and
watched his ecstasy, I used to pull myself up and say to myself, "You
_know_ he isn't like that. Look at him--what woolly lamb could be more
simple and innocent than he is now?" And if anybody had come to me and
asked me if I didn't think that Jevons _was_ a little awful I should have
said that if you were a little awful yourself you might think so, but not
otherwise. My conscience has told me that as he became more successful I
became more critical; it has even suggested that I may have been jealous
of his success.

* * * * *

But that was in the days (they were comparatively innocent) of his first
motor-car. Round that car there really is a light of romance and of
adventure, a glamour that isn't at all the glamour of his opulence. In
those days he did look upon a motor-car mainly as an instrument of
pleasure, and not as a vulgar advertisement of his income. In June, at
any rate, he was still the master of his car and not--as we saw him later
on--its servant. There never was anything like that first fury of his
motoring.

It couldn't last.