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She said, "Whatever do you think you're doing now?" I said we might not know what we were doing, but we knew what we were going to do. We were going to take her back with us in the car. Norah said No, our idea was to run back to Amershott before Jimmy got there. "Where were you running to when you saw me sitting up here?" she said.
Sometimes I think she'd worked that too; she knew the firm, and she wasn't Mrs. She'd got her car Jimmy'd ordered it for Amershott and forgotten about it and her chauffeur, and I could go in it with her if I liked. It was a better car than the one I'd had in Belgium before or, she said significantly, than the one I was going to take out with me. It was true that I didn't know anything about cars.
If it had not been for troops on the high road, and for the stillness of the coverts, and for the recruiting posters stuck everywhere on the barn-doors, and for the strange figure of old Perrott driving the mail-cart from Midhurst to Amershott instead of his son, you wouldn't have known that the war had anything to do with England.
When we had got back to London at noon on Tuesday, which was the end of Jimmy's fortnight, I found a wire from Amershott waiting for me. It had been sent that morning. It said: "Leaving to-morrow. Must see you urgent business. Can you come down this evening. I knew that he wouldn't send a wire like that without good reason; so I went. A light rain was falling when I reached Midhurst.
And I cannot tell you whether he was really altered, or whether he had been like that all the time before Amershott had shown him up, and none of us had seen it except Viola. Oh no it's impossible. He had altered. If he had been like this we must have seen it. What Viola had seen if she had seen anything was only the foreshadowing, the bare possibility of this.
What a man wants to set him off is landscape, Furny, landscape. You should see me on the goose-green at Amershott towards post-time." Well, I did see him on the goose-green towards post-time, and I saw what he meant. It was really as if I'd never seen him before properly. Heavens, how he stood out! It was as if a stage had been cleared for him, and for the figure he cut. He was quite right.
Even the house in Mayfair justified itself when he let it, with all its principal rooms furnished, to an American railway magnate at a rent that enabled him to indulge the passion he had conceived for Amershott Old Grange. He used to say he would never have been happy again if he couldn't have had Amershott Old Grange. Everything about it seemed propitious.
If anybody knew anything about English social conditions it was Tasker Jevons. He had calculated all the chances and provided for the ostracism that attends the inexpert invader of the country-side. He was aware that there were powers in and around Amershott that were not to be conciliated.
It seemed to me, as far as I could make out, that Viola hadn't seen or heard of him since she had left Amershott. She was too busy and too much wrapped in Reggie to bother about him either; at least, it looked like it. She seems to have known in a vague way that he had talked about going to the front, but I didn't believe she thought he would ever get there. And he had lain low for a fortnight.
"Till then for Heaven's sake let the poor thing have peace for three days to think in." "That's all very well," I said, "but what are we to say to Jimmy when he comes back this afternoon?" "You say you say she's tired of of Amershott and wants three days in London to herself. No, you don't. You don't say anything. You leave it to me. Vee-Vee said it was to be left to me."
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