Where would it end?  What would happen next?  Nothing was too outrageously, maniacally impossible.  I walked up Sloane Street, a street for which impeccable respectability, security of life and person, comfortable, modern, twentieth-century, prosperous smugness has no superior in all the smug cities of the earth, and I was prepared to encounter with a smile of recognition anything that the whirling brains of Bedlam had ever conceived.  Why should not this little lady tripping along with gold chain-bag and anxious, shopping knit of the brow, throw her arms round my neck and salute me as her long-lost brother?  Why should not the patient horses in that omnibus suddenly turn into griffins and begin to snort fire from their nostrils?  Why should not that policeman, who, on his beat, was approaching me with the heavy, measured tread, suddenly arrest me for complicity in the Pazzi Conspiracy or the Rye House Plot?  Why should not the whole of the decorous street suddenly change into the inconsequence of an Empire ballet?  Why should not the heavens fall down and universal chaos envelop all?

The only possible reason I can think of now is that the Almighty Powers did not consider it worth while to go to quite so much trouble on my account.

This, however, gives you some idea of my state of mind.  But though it lasted for a considerable time, I would not have you believe that I fostered it unduly.  Indeed, I repudiated it with some disgust.  I took it out, examined it, and finding it preposterous, set to work to modify it into harmony with the circumstances of my every-day life.  Even the most sorely tried of men cannot walk abroad shedding his exasperation around like pestilence.  If he does, he is put into a lunatic asylum.

If a man cannot immediately assuage the hunger of his heart, he must meet starvation with a smiling face.  In the meantime, he has to eat so as to satisfy the hunger of his body, to clothe himself with a certain discrimination, to attend to polite commerce with his fellow man and to put to some fair use the hours of his day.  I did not doubt but that by means of intelligent inquiry which I determined to pursue in every possible direction I should sooner or later obtain news of Lola.  A lady with a troupe of performing cats could not for long remain in obscurity.  True, I might have gone in gallant quest of her; but I had had enough of such fool adventures.  I bided my time, consulted with Dale, who took up the work of a private detective agency with his usual zeal, writing letters to every crony who languished in the exile of foreign embassies, and corresponding (unknown to Lady Kynnersley) with the agencies of the International Aid Society, did what I could on my own account, and turned my attention seriously to the regeneration of the Judds.