inessential to this story) I turned over to him any books that came more into his province than mine. His province, I can tell you, was pretty extensive, too.

He began by doing me the honour to consult me about any instances that seemed doubtful.

And so—you see how carefully I had prepared his path for him—one afternoon he turned up at my rooms, uninvited, between four and five. He said he remembered I had told him I should be free at that hour.

He remembered. Yes; I don't think Tasker Jevons ever forgot anything, anything likely to be useful to him, in his life.

And he hadn't been with me ten minutes before Viola Thesiger came in.

He was saying, "Why the Heaven-afflicted idiot" (his author) "should think it necessary—" when Viola came in.

She came in, and suddenly I made up my mind that she was beautiful. I hadn't seen it before. I don't know why I saw it now. It may have been some turn of her small, squarish head that surprised me with subtle tendernesses and curves; or more likely it may have been her effect on him. I may have seen her with his eyes. I don't know—I don't know. I hardly like to think he saw anything in her I hadn't seen first.

He stopped talking. They looked at each other. I introduced him. Not to have introduced him would have struck him as a slight.

I ordered tea at once in the hope of hastening his departure. He had been curiously silent since she had come in.

But he didn't go. He just sat there, saying nothing, but looking at her furtively now and again, and blinking, as if looking at her hurt him. Whenever she said anything he stared, with his mouth a little open, breathing heavily.

She hadn't paid very much attention to him. Then, suddenly, as if intrigued by his silence, she said:

"Who is the Heaven-afflicted idiot?"

I said, "Ask Mr. Jevons."

She did.

Jevons didn't answer her. He simply looked at her and blinked. Then he looked away again.

"Come," I said, "you might finish what you were going to say."

"I don't know," he muttered, "that I was going to say anything—Oh yes—that thing you sent me. Why the silly blighter should suppose it's necessary to stick in a storm at sea when it's quite obvious he hasn't seen one—he talks about a brig when he means a bark, and from the way he navigates her you'd say the wind blew all ways at once in the Atlantic."

I said it might for all I knew; and I asked him if he'd ever seen a storm at sea himself.

It seemed he had. He'd been ordered a sea-voyage for his health after his spell of printing; and his uncle, who was a sea-captain, took him with him to Hong-Kong in his ship. And he had been all through a cyclone in the Pacific.

I got him—with some difficulty, for he had become extremely shy—I got him to tell us about it.

He did. And by the time he had finished with us we had all been through a cyclone in the Pacific.

It was too much. The little beast could talk almost as well as he wrote.
A fellow who can write like Tasker Jevons has no business to talk at all.

Viola left soon after six. He had outstayed her. I went downstairs with her. When I came back to him he was still staring at the doorway she had passed through.

"Who's that girl?" he said.

I said she was my typist.

He meditated, and brought out as the result: "Do you mind telling me how much she charges you?"

I told him. He looked dejected.

"I can't afford her," he said presently. "No. I can't possibly afford her. Not yet." He paused. "Do you mind giving me her address?"

"I thought you said you couldn't afford her?"

"I can't. Not yet. But I will afford her. I will. I give myself another—" He stopped. His mouth fell ajar, and I saw his lips moving as he went through some inaudible calculation—"another six months."

He hid his face in his hands and ran his fingers through his hair. Then, as if he conceived himself to be unobserved behind this shelter, he let himself go; and I became the witness of an agony, a passion, a self-abandoned nakedness, to the utter shedding of all reticences and decencies, with nothing but those thin hands and that hair between me and it.

"I'll work," he said. "I'll work like a hundred bloody niggers. Like ten hundred thousand million sweated tailors in a stinking cellar. I'll pinch. I'll skimp and save. I'll deny myself butter. I'll wear celluloid collars and sell my dress-suit. My God! I'd sell the coat off my back and the shoes off my feet; I'd sell my own mother's body off her death-bed, and go without my dinner for nine months to see her again for five minutes. Just to see her for five minutes. Five (unprintable) little minutes that another man wouldn't know what to do with, wouldn't use for tying up a bootlace in."

Pause.

"I didn't know it hurt. I didn't know a girl's face could land you one like this, and her eyes jab you, and her voice turn round and round in your stomach like a circular saw. That's what it feels like. Exactly.

"Dry up, you old Geyser, yourself. I'm getting it, not you. You'd spout if you'd had to sit tight with all the gas in the shop blazing away under you for the last hour. If you can turn it off at the meter, turn it. I can't. No, I won't have another cup of tea. And I won't get up and clear out, I'm going to sit here another five minutes. I'm not well, I tell you, and it relieves me to talk about it. I don't care if you don't listen. Or if you do. I'm past caring.

"D'you notice that I didn't speak a word to her—not one blessed word the whole time? I should have choked if I'd tried to. I didn't want to look at her, to think of her. That's why I told that rotten story, just to keep myself going. What a blethering idiot she must have thought me! What a putrid ass! The sea—And me!

"And the way she looked at me—"

I said, "D'you mean to say, Jevons, it didn't happen?"

And he groaned. "Oh, it happened all right. I can't invent things to save my life.

"God! It isn't even as if she was pretty. I could understand that."

He grabbed his throat suddenly and began to cough.

I tried to be kind to him. "Look here," I said, "old chap. I'm awfully sorry if it takes you this way. But it's no good."

He turned on me coughing and choking. I cannot remember all he said or half the things he called me, but it was something like this: "You snivelling defective." (Cough) "You septic idiot." (Cough) "You poisonous and polluted ass." (Cough, cough, cough) "You scarlet imbecile." (I have to water down the increasing richness of his epithets.) "You last diminutive purple embryo of an epileptic stock, do you suppose I don't know that? No good? Of course it's no good—yet. I got to wait for another six months. And you can take it from me, if a fellow knows what he wants, and doesn't try to get it—doesn't know how to get it—in six months—and doesn't find out—he's no good, if you like."

These words didn't strike me at the time as having any personal application. He was to repeat them later on, however, in circumstances which I defy anybody to have foreseen.

* * * * *

I cannot recall the precise phases of their remarkable friendship. I wasn't present at its earliest stages.

I had my first intimation of its existence one evening in the winter