with her hands and with her head. She was tired of playing tennis on the
velvet lawns of the Canons' gardens; she was tired of calling on the
Canons' wives and talking to their daughters. I am aware that Canterbury
is a garrison town and that other resources, and other prospects, I
suppose, were open to Viola. But Viola was tired of talking to the
garrison. I think she would have been tired in any case, even if the
garrison hadn't been bespoken, as it were, by her unmarried sisters. (It
is, humanly speaking, impossible that, even in a garrison town, seven
sisters will _all_ marry into the Service, as I fatuously supposed Mrs.
Thesiger must have realized when she asked me to Canterbury.) It always
bored Viola to do what her family did, and what her family, just because
they did it, expected her to do. And somehow, in the long hours spent in
the Cathedral Close, she had acquired a taste for what she called
"literature," what she innocently believed to be literature. She was of
an engaging innocence in this respect; so that typing authors'
manuscripts appealed to her as a vocation that combined one of the
highest forms of cerebral activity with I don't know what glamour of
romantic adventure.

Her enthusiasm, her veneration for the written word made her an admirable
typist. But not all at once. To say that she brought to her really
horrible task a respect, a meticulous devotion, would give you no idea of
the child's attitude; it was a blind, savage superstition that would have
been exasperating if it had not been so heart-rending. It cleared
gradually until it became intelligent co-operation.

I trained her for six months.

I don't suppose I ever worked harder than I did in that first half year
of her. I mean my output was never greater. For every blessed thing I