istance of his London home thousands of human beings live
like the beasts that perish; but never before had I spent an intimate
night in one of the foul dens where the living and perishing take place.
The awful pity of it entered my soul.

So deeply was I impressed with the responsibility of what I had
undertaken, so grimly was I haunted by the sight of the pallid, howling
travesty of a man and the squeezed-out, whimpering woman, that the
memory of the conflicting emotions that had driven me to Campion the
night before returned to me with a shock.

"It strikes me," I murmured, as I shaved, "that I am living very
intensely indeed. Here am I in love with two women at once, and almost
hysterically enthusiastic over a delirious tailor." Then I cut my cheek
and murmured no more, until the operation was concluded.

I had arranged to accompany Lola that afternoon to the Zoological
Gardens. This was a favourite resort of hers. She was on intimate terms
with keepers and animals, and her curious magnetism allowed her to play
such tricks with lions and tigers and other ferocious beasts as made
my blood run cold. As for the bears, they greeted her approach with
shrieking demonstrations of affection. On such occasions I felt the same
curious physical antipathy as I did when she had dominated Anastasius's
ill-conditioned cat. She seemed to enter another sphere of being in
which neither I nor anything human had a place.

With some such dim thoughts in my head, I reached her door in Cadogan
Gardens. The sight of her electric brougham that stood waiting switched
my thoughts into another groove, but one running oddly parallel.
Electric broughams also carried her out of my sphere. I had humbly
performed the journey thither in an omnibus.

She received me in her big, expansive way.

"Lord! How good it is to see you. I was getting the--I was going to say
'the blind hump'--but you don't like it. I was going to turn crazy and
bite the furniture."

"Why?" I asked with masculine directness.

"I've been trying to educate myself--to read poetry. Look here"--she
caught a small brown-covered octavo volume from the table. "I can't make
head or tail of it. It proved to me that it was no use. If I couldn't
understand poetry, I couldn't understand anything. It was no good trying
to educate myself. I gave it up. And then I got what you don't like me
to call the hump."

"You dear Lola!" I cried, laughing. "I don't believe any one has ever
made