“You may not understand exactly what I mean, my dear Campion,” said I; “but I attribute the most unholy disasters of my life to a ghastly attempt of mine to play Deputy Providence.”

“But who’s asking you to play Deputy Providence?” he shouted.  “It’s the very last idiot thing I want done.  I want you to do certain definite practical work for that family under the experienced direction of the authorities at Barbara’s Building.  There, do you understand now?”

“Very well, I’ll do anything you like.”

Thus it befell that I undertook to look after the moral, material, and spiritual welfare of the family of an alcoholic tailor by the name of Judd who dwelt in a vile slum in South Lambeth.  My head was full of the prospect when I awoke at noon, for I had gone exhausted to sleep as soon as I reached home.  If goodwill, backed by the experience of Barbara’s Building, could do aught towards the alleviation of human misery, I determined that it should be done.  And there was much misery to be alleviated in the Judd family.  I had no clear notion of the means whereby I was to accomplish this; but I knew that it would be a philanthropic pursuit far different from my previous eumoirous wanderings abut London when, with a mind conscious of well-doing, I distributed embarrassing five-pound notes to the poor and needy.

I had known—­what comfortable, well-fed gentleman does not?—­that within easy walking distance 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.