to a pitch of affability and generosity, I asked him to come and see me
at such time as he should be free. And because, also, I was indifferent
and lazy and didn't want to be seriously bothered with him, instead of
asking him to lunch or dine with me, I said I was generally free myself
between four and five.

Between four and five was an hour when Viola was very apt to come in.

In the instant that followed the posting of that letter I saw what I had
done. And I wrote to him the next day asking him to dinner, in order that
he should not come in between four and five. For some weeks, whenever I
fancied he was about due at four o'clock, I wrote and asked him to
dinner. That was how I fastened him to me. There wasn't any sense in
which he fastened on me. I wasn't by any means his only hope.

I may say at once I was prostrated as any slave before his conversation.

I shall never forget the radiance of his twinkle when he told me he had
been sacked three weeks ago from the sporting paper that had provided him
with his sole visible means of subsistence. It was his blessed (only he
didn't call it blessed) style that had dished him: the suicidal _élan_
that he brought to the business. He was warned, he said. He was aware
that his existence as a reporter hung by the bare thread of statement
(wearing thinner and thinner) on which he weaved his fantastic web. His
editor told him he was engaged to report football, not to play it with
the paper. But he couldn't help it. He had got, he said, the ensanguined
habit. Still, I was not to imagine that he bungled things. He jolly well
knew his way about. In his wildest flights there was a homing impulse; he
was preparing a place for himself all the time (that it happened to be
_my_ place didn't seem to afflict him in the least). Like St. Paul, he