“Then come over here and I’ll tell you all about it.”

I sat with her in a corner of the room and listened to her fairy-tale.  She wrung my heart to such a pitch of sympathy that I rose and grasped her by the hand.

“It is indeed a noble project,” I cried.  “I love the London cabby as my brother, and I’ll post you a cheque for a thousand pounds this evening.  Good-bye!”

I left her in a state of joyous stupefaction and made my escape.  If it had not fallen in with my general scheme of good works I should regard it as an expensive method of avoiding unpleasant questions.

Another philanthropist, by the way, of quite a different type from Lady Kynnersley, who has lately benefited by my eleemosynary mania is Rex Campion.  I have known him since our University days and have maintained a sincere though desultory friendship with him ever since.  He is also a friend of Eleanor Faversham, whom he now and then inveigles into weird doings in the impossible slums of South Lambeth.  He has tried on many occasions to lure me into his web, but hitherto I have resisted.  Being the possessor of a large fortune, he has been able to gratify a devouring passion for philanthropy, and has squandered most of his money on an institution—­a kind of club, school, labour-bureau, dispensary, soup-kitchen, all rolled into one—­in Lambeth; and there he lives himself, perfectly happy among a hungry, grubby, scarecrow, tatterdemalion crowd.  At a loss for a defining name, he has called it “Barbara’s Building,” after his mother.  His conception of the cosmos is that sun, moon and stars revolve round Barbara’s Building.  How he learned that I was, so to speak, standing at street corners and flinging money into the laps of the poor and needy, I know not.  But he came to see me a day or two ago, full of Barbara’s Building, and departed in high feather with a cheque for a thousand pounds in his pocket.

I may remark here on the peculiar difficulty there is in playing Monte Cristo with anything like picturesque grace.  Any dull dog that owns a pen and a banking-account can write out cheques for charitable institutions.  But to accomplish anything personal, imaginative, adventurous, anything with a touch of distinction, is a less easy matter.  You wake up in the morning with the altruistic yearnings of a St. Francois de Sales, and yet somehow you go to bed in the evening with the craving unsatisfied.  You have really had so few opportunities; and when an occasion does arise it is hedged around with such difficulties as to baffle all but the most persistent.  Have you ever tried to give a beggar a five-pound note?  I did this morning.

She was a miserable, shivering, starving woman of fifty selling matches in Sackville Street.  She held out a shrivelled hand to me, and eyes that once had been beautiful pleaded hungrily for alms.

“Here,” said I to myself, “is an opportunity of bringing unimagined gladness for a month or two into this forlorn creature’s life.”