Oldfield, now and then took
her out to dinner, I considered she was leading a cheerful if not a
merry life. I smiled indulgently at Lola's devotion to the cats and
congratulated her on having found another means whereby to beguile the
_tedium vitae_ which is the arch-enemy of content.

"I wish I could find such a means myself," said I.

I not only had the wish, but the imperative need to so do. To stand like
Ajax defying the lightning is magnificent, but as a continuous avocation
it is wearisome and unprofitable, especially if carried on in a tiny
bachelor suite, an eyrie of a place, at the top of a block of flats in
Victoria Street. Indeed, if I did not add soon to the meagre remains of
my fortune, I should not be able to afford the luxury of the bachelor
suite. Conscious of this, I left the lightning alone, after a last
denunciatory shake of the fist, and descended into the busy ways of men
to look for work.

Thus I entered on the second stage of my career--that of a soldier
of Fortune. At first I was doubtful as to what path to glory and
bread-and-butter I could carve out for myself. Hitherto I had been
Fortune's darling instead of her mercenary, and she had most politely
carved out my paths for me, until she had played her jade's trick
and left me in the ditch. Now things were different. I stood alone,
ironical, ambitionless, still questioning the utility of human effort,
yet determined to play the game of life to its bitter end. What could I
do?

It is true that I had been called to the Bar in my tentative youth,
while I drafted documents for my betters to pull to pieces and rewrite
at the Foreign Office; but I had never seen a brief, and my memories
of Gaius, Justinian, Williams's "Real Property," and Austin's
"Jurisprudence," were as nebulous as those of the Differential Calculus
over whose facetiae I had pondered during my schooldays. The law was as
closed to me as medicine. I had no profession. I therefore drifted
into the one pursuit for which my training had qualified me, namely,
political journalism. I had written much, in my amateur way, during my
ten years' membership of Parliament; why, I hardly know--not because I
needed money, not because I had thoughts which I burned to express, and
certainly not through vain desire of notoriety. Perhaps the motive was
twofold, an ingrained Puckish delight in the incongruous--it seemed
incongruous for an airy epicurean like myself to spend stodgy
hours writing st