me to pass that Lola and I
are now all-powerful in Barbara's Building. It has become the child of
our adoption and we love it with a deep and almost fanatic affection.
Before Lola my influence and personality fade into nothingness. She is
the power, the terror, the adoration of Lambeth. If she chose she
could control the Parliamentary vote of the borough. Her great, direct,
large-hearted personality carries all before it. And with it there is
something of the uncanny. A feat of hers in the early days is by way of
becoming legendary.

A woman, on the books of the Building, was about to bring a hopeless
human fragment into a grey world. Lola went to see what aid the Building
could provide. In front of the door lounged the husband, a hulking
porter in a Bermondsey factory. Glowering at his feet lay a vicious
mongrel dog--bull-terrier, Irish-terrier, mastiff--so did Lola with
her trained eye distinguish the strains. When she asked for his wife in
travail the chivalrous gentleman took his pipe from his mouth, spat, and
after the manner of his kind referred to the disfigurement of her face
in terms impossible to transcribe. She paid no attention.

"I'm coming upstairs to see your wife."

"If you pass that door, s'welp me Gawd, I'll set the dog on yer."

She paused. He urged the dog, who bristled and growled and showed his
teeth. Lola picked the animal up, as she would have picked up a sofa
cushion, and threw him across the street. She went to where he had
fallen, ordered him to his feet, and the dog licked her hand. She came
back with a laugh.

"I'll do the same to you if you don't let me in!"

She pushed the hulking brute aside. He resisted and laid hands on her.
By some extraordinary tamer's art of which she had in vain tried to
explain to me the secret, and with no apparent effort, she glided away
from him and sent him cowering and subdued some feet beyond the lintel
of the door. The street, which was watching, went into a roar of
laughter and applause. Lola mounted the stairs and attended to the
business in hand. When she came down the man was still standing at the
threshold smoking an obfusticated pipe. He blinked at her as if she had
been a human dynamo.

"Come round to Barbara's Building at six o'clock and tell me how she
is."

He came on the stroke of six.

The fame of Lola spread through the borough, and now she can walk
feared, honoured, unmolested by night or by day through the streets
of horror and cri