“Yes, I do.  And it strikes me I had better go and find him myself.”

She started.  “You?”

“Yes,” I said.  “The Chasseurs d’Afrique are probably in Africa, and the doctors have ordered me to winter in a hot climate, and I shall go on writing a million letters a day if I stay here, which will kill me off in no time with brain fag and writer’s cramp.  Your husband will be what the newspapers call an objective.  Good-bye!” said I, “I’ll bring him to you dead or alive.”

And without knowing it at the time, I made an exit as magnificent as that of Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos.

CHAPTER VIII

I do not know whether I ought to laugh or rail.  Judged by the ordinary canons that regulate the respectable life to which I have been accustomed, I am little short of a lunatic.  The question is:  Does the recognition of lunacy in oneself tend to amusement or anger?  I compromise with myself.  I am angry at having been forced on an insane adventure, but the prospect of its absurdity gives me a considerable pleasure.

Let me set it down once and for all.  I resent Lola Brandt’s existence.  When I am out of her company I can contemplate her calmly from my vantage of social and intellectual superiority.  I can pooh-pooh her fascinations.  I can crack jokes on her shortcomings.  I can see perfectly well that I am Simon de Gex, M.P. (I have not yet been appointed to the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds), of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, a barrister of the Inner Temple (though a brief would cause me as much dismay as a command to conduct the orchestra at Covent Garden), formerly of the Foreign Office, a man of the world, a diner-out, a hardened jester at feminine wiles, a cynical student of philosophy, a man of birth, and, I believe, breeding with a cultivated taste in wine and food and furniture, one also who, but for a little pain inside, would soon become a Member of His Majesty’s Government, and eventually drop the “Esquire” at the end of his name and stick “The Right Honourable” in front of it—­in fact, a most superior, wise and important person; and I can also see perfectly well that Lola Brandt is an uneducated, lowly bred, vagabond female, with a taste, as I have remarked before, for wild beasts and tea-parties, with whom I have as much in common as I have with the feathered lady on a coster’s donkey-cart or the Fat Woman at the Fair.  I can see all this perfectly well in the calm seclusion of my library.  But when I am in her presence my superiority, like Bob Acres’s valour, oozes out through my finger-tips; I become a besotted idiot; the sense and the sight and the sound of her overpower me; I proclaim her rich and remarkable personality; and I bask in her lazy smiles like any silly undergraduate whose knowledge of women has hitherto been limited to his sisters and the common little girl at the tobacconist’s.