d I, "I'll bring him to
you dead or alive."

And without knowing it at the time, I made an exit as magnificent as
that of Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos.

CHAPTER VIII

I do not know whether I ought to laugh or rail. Judged by the ordinary
canons that regulate the respectable life to which I have been
accustomed, I am little short of a lunatic. The question is: Does
the recognition of lunacy in oneself tend to amusement or anger? I
compromise with myself. I am angry at having been forced on an insane
adventure, but the prospect of its absurdity gives me a considerable
pleasure.

Let me set it down once and for all. I resent Lola Brandt's existence.
When I am out of her company I can contemplate her calmly from my
vantage of social and intellectual superiority. I can pooh-pooh her
fascinations. I can crack jokes on her shortcomings. I can see perfectly
well that I am Simon de Gex, M.P. (I have not yet been appointed to
the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds), of Eton and Trinity College,
Cambridge, a barrister of the Inner Temple (though a brief would cause
me as much dismay as a command to conduct the orchestra at Covent
Garden), formerly of the Foreign Office, a man of the world, a
diner-out, a hardened jester at feminine wiles, a cynical student of
philosophy, a man of birth, and, I believe, breeding with a cultivated
taste in wine and food and furniture, one also who, but for a little
pain inside, would soon become a Member of His Majesty's Government,
and eventually drop the "Esquire" at the end of his name and stick "The
Right Honourable" in front of it--in fact, a most superior, wise and
important person; and I can also see perfectly well that Lola Brandt
is an uneducated, lowly bred, vagabond female, with a taste, as I have
remarked before, for wild beasts and tea-parties, with whom I have
as much in common as I have with the feathered lady on a coster's
donkey-cart or the Fat Woman at the Fair. I can see all this perfectly
well in the calm seclusion of my library. But when I am in her
presence my superiority, like Bob Acres's valour, oozes out through my
finger-tips; I become a besotted idiot; the sense and the sight and
the sound of her overpower me; I proclaim her rich and remarkable
personality; and I bask in her lazy smiles like any silly undergraduate
whose knowledge of women has hitherto been limited to his sisters and
the common little girl at the tobacconist's.

I say I resent it. I resen