all, I am amazed at my own stupidity. I was, of course, aware that Viola
was sorry for him; but I might have known that a girl's pity was not a
stimulant that would keep a man like Jevons going for very long. I am
sure he would never have lowered himself by any appeal to it. Why, the
bare idea of pity would have been intolerable to him, bursting, as he
was, with vitality and invading with the courage and energy and genius of
a conqueror a world that was not his.

He laid before me very soon what I can only call his plan of campaign.
Journalism with him was a purely defensive operation; but the novel and
the short story were his attack. The work that Viola had typed for him
was his first novel. He had dug himself in very securely that winter, and
each paper that he had occupied and left behind him was a line of
trenches that shifted nearer and nearer towards the desired territory. He
didn't begin his assault on the public before he had secured his retreat.

I know I am writing about a man whom many people still consider a great
novelist and a great playwright. God knows I don't want to disparage him.
But to me what he has written matters so little; it has no interest for
me except as his vehicle, the vehicle in which he arrived; which brought
him to his destination quicker perhaps than any other which he could have
chosen. His talent was so adroit that he might have chosen almost any
other; chance and a happy knack and a habit of observation determined his
selection of the written word. Compared with the spectacle of his
arrival, what he has written is neither here nor there. What I have
written myself is neither here nor there. For the purposes of this
history it counts only as the means which enabled me to witness the last
act of his drama.

That is why I say so much about his adventure, his campaign, his