the right thing.

Besides, it had knocked him all to bits--the sheer prettiness of it.

He laid bare for me all the curious intricacies of a soul tortured by its
own delicacy. There was agony in his eyes.

If he were to take this kindness from a lady--would it, in my opinion, or
would it not, be cricket?

I didn't like to tell him that he had brought his agony on himself by his
imprudence in employing a typist when he couldn't afford one. So I only
said that, if I knew the lady, he would find her uncommonly hard to move.

He hadn't any hope, he said, of moving her; but did I think that if he
made her a present--say, the Collected Works of George Meredith, it would
meet the case?

I said it would meet the case all right, but that in my opinion it would
spoil its prettiness. If Miss Thesiger didn't want to be paid in one way,
she wouldn't at all care about being paid in another. Perhaps Miss
Thesiger liked being pretty. Hadn't he better leave it at that, anyhow,
for the present?

You see I looked on Viola and Viola's behaviour as infinitely more my
concern than his. I found myself replying for her as she would have
wished me to reply, as if I could claim an intenser appreciation of her
motives than was his, as if she and I were agreed about this question of
helping Tasker Jevons and I were the custodian of her generosity.

He said he supposed it wouldn't hurt him to leave it at that. It wasn't
as if it wouldn't be all one in the long run. He gave himself three
months.

I supposed he meant to pay her in.

Three weeks later I heard that Jevons was actually living up in Hampstead
in the same house as Viola. I didn't hear it from Viola, but from my man,
Pavitt, who had it from his sister-in-law. And what Pavitt came to tell
me was that Mr. Jevons had been ill.

I went up to Hampstead that afternoon to see him.

I found him in a back room, at the top of the house, sitting by the fire
in an easy-chair, wrapped in a blanket. He was as thin as a lath and his
face was a bright yellow. The very whites of his eyes were yellow. I
would have said you never saw a more miserable object, but that Jevons
was not miserable. He was happy. And as far as his devastated condition
would allow him, he looked happy. This face, yellow with jaundice, was
doing its best to smile. The smile was a grimace, not an affair of
the lips at all, but of the deep crescent lines drawn at right angles to
them. Still, he was smiling. In a sort of