ly because she was not woman, nor good because she could
not be bad. But I could have been very bad; and to me she was,
luckily, horrible. I could not divorce her two apparent natures, still
less my own. We are bound--all of us--by our natures, bound by them
and bounded. I could not have touched the pitch she lived with, the
pitch of which she was, without defilement. Let me hope that I
realised that much. I shall not say how my feet burned to enter that
slum of squalor where hovered this bird of the night, unless I add, as
I can do with truth, that I did not slake them there. I saw her on and
off afterward for a year, perhaps; but tenancies are short in London.
There was a flitting during one autumn when I was away on vacation,
and I came back to see new faces in the half-doorway and other elbows
on the familiar ledge.

But as I have said above, a new affair engrossed me shortly after my
night pageant on Parliament Hill. This was concerned with a famous
personage whom all knowing London (though I for one had not known it)
called Quidnunc.

But before I present to the curious reader the facts of a case which
caused so much commotion in distinguished bosoms of the late
"eighties," I think I should say that, while I have a strong
conviction as to the identity of the person himself, I shall not
express it. I accept the doctrine that there are some names not to be
uttered. Similarly I shall neither defend nor extenuate; if I throw it
out at all it will be as a hint to the judicious, or a clew, if you
like, to those who are groping a way in or out of the labyrinth of
Being. To me two things are especially absurd: one is that the
trousered, or skirted, forms we eat with, walk with, or pass unheeded,
are all the population of our world; the other, that these creatures,
ostensibly men or women with fancies, hopes, fears, appetites like our
own, are necessarily of the same nature as ourselves. If beings from
another sphere should, by intention or chance, meet and mingle with
us, I don't see how we could apprehend them at all except in our own
mode, or unless they were, so to speak, translated into our idiom. But
enough of that. The year in which I first met Quidnunc, so far as my
memory serves me, was 1886.

* * * * *

I was in those days a student of the law, with chambers in Gray's Inn
which I daily attended; but being more interested in palaeography than
in modern practice, and intending to