The weeks passed.

Besides ministering to my dilapidated spirit, Lola found occupation in looking after the cattery of Anastasius Papadopoulos, which the little 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 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.