the rent.  Into this I moved with such of my furniture as I withdrew from the auctioneer’s hammer, and there I prepared to stay until necessity should drive me to the Bloomsbury boarding-house.  I thought I would graduate my descent.  Before I moved, however, she came to the Albany for the first and only time to see the splendour I was about to quit.  In a modest way it was splendour.  My chambers were really a large double flat to the tasteful furnishing of which I had devoted the thought and interest of many years.  She went with me through the rooms.  The dining-room was all Chippendale, each piece a long-coveted and hunted treasure; the library old oak; the drawing-room a comfortable and cunning medley.  There were bits of old china, pieces of tapestry, some rare prints, my choice collection of mezzotints, a picture or two of value—­one a Lancret, a very dear possession.  And there were my books—­once I had a passion for rare bindings.  Every thing had to me a personal significance, and I hated the idea of surrender more than I dared to confess even to myself.  But I said to Lola: 

“Vanity of vanities!  All things expensive are vanity!”

Her eyes glistened and she slipped her arm through mine and patted the back of my hand.

“If you talk like that I shall cry and make a fool of myself,” she said in a broken manner.

It is not so much the thing that is done or the thing that is said that matters, but the way of doing or saying it.  In the commonplace pat on the hand, in the break in the commonplace words there was something that went straight to my heart.  I squeezed her arm and whispered: 

“Thank you, dear.”

This sympathy so sure and yet so delicately conveyed was mine for the trouble of mounting the stairs that led to her drawing-room in Cadogan Gardens.  She seemed to be watching my heart the whole time, so that without my asking, without my knowledge even, she could touch each sore spot as it appeared, with the healing finger.  For herself she made no claims, and because she did not in any way declare herself to be unhappy, I, after the manner of men, took her happiness for granted.  For lives there a man who does not believe that an uncomplaining woman has nothing to complain of?  It is his masculine prerogative of density.  Besides, does not he himself when hurt bellow like a bull?  Why, he argues, should not wounded woman do the same?  So, when I wanted companionship, I used to sit in the familiar room and make Adolphus, the Chow dog, shoulder arms with the poker, and gossip restfully with Lola, who sprawled in her old languorous, loose-limbed way among the cushions of her easy chair.  Gradually my habitual reserve melted from me, and at last I gave her my whole confidence, telling her of my disastrous pursuit of eumoiriety, of Eleanor Faversham, of the attitude of Society, in fact, of most of what I have set down in the preceding pages.  She was greatly interested in everything, especially in Eleanor Faversham.  She wanted to know the colour of her eyes and hair and how she dressed.  Women are odd creatures.