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Updated: June 26, 2025
"Well, as you are here," she said, "I'd let you run me down to Horsham, if you want a run, only I can't very well use Jimmy's car." I think it was Norah who asked her what on earth she was doing at Fittleworth. "Can't you see," she said, "that I'm waiting for the next train?" "Did you walk here from Amershott, or what?" I said. She said, "Rather not. I was in the train."
Some secret and strong revulsion had thrown her back on the people and the things that she had been brought up amongst and that she had run away from. When Jimmy jarred on her she turned to Charlie for relief. And, after all, as Norah said, he was her cousin. I don't think we either of us saw anything more in it than that. Without some such reaction she must have surrendered to Amershott.
A hired dog-cart met me at the station, so I gathered that Jimmy's mad passion for his motor-car had survived the war. And at Amershott everything seemed to have survived.
I do not think there was a single weakness or a single secret meanness that he had that didn't suddenly rise up and stand out on the background of Amershott. All through that summer there, quite frankly, I detested Jevons. I believe that Norah came near detesting him, that she felt something very like contempt for him. And if Norah felt it you may imagine what Viola would feel.
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?"
I believe he never touched her without washing his hands first. We had been at Amershott a week and we hadn't been out in that car three times, though the weather was perfect. Jimmy never could see that it was perfect enough.
I can see him sitting there in his study at Amershott Old Grange. He was deadly quiet. Not a gesture came to disturb my sense of his tranquil triumph in the fulfilment of his prophecy. To say that he enjoyed the European conflagration because it had proved him so abundantly right would give a false impression of an extraordinary and complicated state of mind.
He had been happy, I know, at Hampstead in the first two years of his marriage; he had been happy most of the time in Edwardes Square; even in Mayfair he had had moments; and Amershott had been, on the whole, an improvement on Mayfair. And he had lived through his three weeks in Ghent in a sort of ecstasy.
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.
When I spoke of this to Norah, she said that Viola had told him that if he couldn't be decent to Jimmy she wouldn't have him there. Well, there he was, hanging about Viola from morning till night; he had any amount of time on his hands now, and he spent most of it at Amershott. He was there when we weren't sometimes, so that we couldn't keep track of him.
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