The amazing, the astounding, the utterly incredible thing about the whole matter was that I not only liked it, but plunged into it heart and soul as I had never plunged into work before.  I discovered sympathies that had hitherto lain undreamed of within me.  In my electioneering days I had, it is true, foregathered with the sons of toil.  I had shaken the horny hands of men and the soap-suddy hands of women.  I had flattered them and cajoled them and shown myself mighty affable, as a sensible and aspiring Parliamentary candidate should do; but the way to their hearts I had never found, I had never dreamed of seeking.  And now it seemed as if the great gift had been bestowed on me—­and I examined it with a new and almost tremulous delight.

Also, for the first time in all my life, I had taken pain to be the companion of my soul.  All my efforts to find Lola were fruitless.  I became acquainted with the heartache, the longing for the unattainable, the agony of spirit.  The only anodyne was a forgetfulness of self, the only compensation a glimmer of a hope and the shadow of a smile in the grey and leaden lives around me.

On Whit Monday evening I was walking along the Thames Embankment on my way home from Waterloo Station, wet through, tired out, disappointed, and looking forward to the dry, soft raiment, the warm, cosy room, the excellent dinner that awaited me in my flat.  I—­with several others—­had been helping Campion with his annual outing of factory girls and young hooligans.  The weather, which had been perfect on Saturday, Sunday, and when we had started, a gay and astonishing army, at seven o’clock, had broken before ten.  It had rained, dully miserable, insistently all day long.  The happy day in the New Forest had been a damp and dismal fiasco.  I was returning home, thinking I might walk off an incipient chill, as depressed as no one but the baffled philanthropist can be, when I perceived a tattered and dejected man sitting on a bench, a clothes-basket between his feet, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and sobbing as if his heart would break.  As the spectacle of a grown-up man crying bitterly in a public thoroughfare was somewhat remarkable, I paused, and then in order to see whether his distress was genuine, and also not to arouse his suspicions, I threw myself in an exhausted manner on the bench beside him.  He continued to sob.  At last I said, raising my voice: 

“You seem to be pretty miserable.  What’s wrong?”

He turned bleared, yet honest-looking eyes upon me.

“The whole blasted show!” said he.  “There’s nothing right in it, s’welp me Gawd.”

I gave a modified assent to the proposition and drew my coat-collar over my eyes.  “Being wet through doesn’t make it any better,” said I.

“Who would ha’ thought it would come down as it has to-day?  Tell me that.  It’s enough to make a man cut his throat!”

I was somewhat surprised.  “You’re not in such a great distress just because it has been a rainy day!”