le
man had left in the charge of his pupil and assistant, Quast. This
Quast apparently was a faithful, stolid, but unintelligent and incapable
German who had remained loyally at his post until Lola found him there
in a state of semi-starvation. The sum of money with which Anastasius
had provided him had been eked out to the last farthing. The cats were
in a pitiable condition. Quast, in despair, was trying to make up his
dull mind whether to sell them or eat them. Lola with superb feminine
disregard of legal rights, annexed the whole cattery, maintained Quast
in his position of pupil and assistant and informed the landlord that
she would be responsible for the rent. Then she set to work to bring the
cats into their proper condition of sleekness, and, that done, to put
them through a systematic course of training. They had been thoroughly
demoralised, she declared, under Quast's maladministration, and had
almost degenerated into the unhistrionic pussies of domestic life. As
for Hephaestus, the great ferocious tom, he was more like an insane
tiger than a cat. He flew at the gate over which he used to jump,
and clawed and bit it to matchwood, and after spitting in fury at
the blazing hoop, sprang at the unhappy Quast as if he had been the
contriver of the indignities to which he was being subjected. These
tales of feline backsliding I used to hear from Lola, and when I asked
her why she devoted her energies to the unproductive education of the
uninspiring animals, she would shrug her shoulders and regard me with a
Giaconda smile.

"In the first place it amuses me. You seem to forget I'm a _dompteuse_,
a tamer of beasts; it's my profession, I was trained to it. It's the
only thing I can do, and it's good to feel that I haven't lost my power.
It's odd, but I feel a different woman when I'm impressing my will
on these wretched cats. You must come one of these days and see a
performance, when I've got them ship-shape. They'll astonish you. And
then," she would add, "I can write to Anastasius and tell him how his
beloved cats are getting on."

Well, it was an interest in her life which, Heaven knows, was not
crowded with exciting incidents. Now that I can look back on these
things with a philosophic eye, I can imagine no drearier existence than
that of a friendless, unoccupied woman in a flat in Cadogan Gardens. At
that time, I did not realise this as completely as I might have done.
Because her old surgeon friend, Sir Joshua