“Why shouldn’t you laugh at the absurd?”

“Because in devotion like that there seems to be something solemn and frightening.  If I told him to kill his cats, he would do it.  If I ordered him to commit Hari-Kari on the hearthrug, he would whip out his knife and obey me.  When you have a human soul at your mercy like that, it’s a kind of sacrilege to laugh at it.  It makes you feel—­oh, I can’t express myself.  Look, it doesn’t make tears come into your eyes exactly, it makes them come into your heart.”

We continued the subject, divagating as we went, and had a nice little sentimental conversation.  There are depths of human feeling I should never have suspected in this lazy panther of a woman, and although she openly avows having no more education than a tinker’s dog, she can talk with considerable force and vividness of expression.

Indeed, when one comes to think of it, a tinker’s dog has a fine education if he be naturally a shrewd animal and takes advantage of his opportunities; and a fine education, too, of its kind was that of the vagabond Lola, who on her way from Dublin to Yokohama had more profitably employed her time than Lady Kynnersley supposed.  She had seen much of the civilised places of the earth in her wanderings from engagement to engagement, and had been an acute observer of men and things.

We exchanged travel pictures and reminiscences.  I found myself floating with her through moonlit Venice, while she chanted with startling exactness the cry of the gondoliers.  To my confusion be it spoken, I forgot all about Dale Kynnersley and my mission.  The lazy voice and rich personality fascinated me.  When I rose to go I found I had spent a couple of hours in her company.  She took me round the room and showed me some of her treasures.

“This is very old.  I think it is fifteenth century,” she said, picking up an Italian ivory.

It was.  I expressed my admiration.  Then maliciously I pointed to a horrible little Tyrolean chalet and said: 

“That, too, is very pretty.”

“It isn’t.  And you know it.”

She is a most disconcerting creature.  I accepted the rebuke meekly.  What else could I do?

“Why, then, do you have it here?”

“It’s a present from Anastasius,” she said.  “Every time he comes to see me he brings what he calls an ’offrande’.  All these things”—­she indicated, with a comprehensive sweep of the arm, the Union Jack cushion, the little men mounting ladders inside bottles, the hen sitting on her nest, and the other trumpery gimcracks—­“all these things are presents from Anastasius.  It would hurt him not to see them here when he calls.”

“You might have a separate cabinet,” I suggested.

“A chamber of horrors?” she laughed.  “No.  It gives him more pleasure to see them as they are—­and a poor little freak doesn’t get much out of life.”

She sighed, and picking up “A Present from Margate” kind of mug, fingered it very tenderly.