“You’re looking very fit.  I head that you had gone through a miraculous operation.  How are you?”

“Perfectly well,” said I, “but I’ve been told that I’m not quite alive even yet.”

He looked anxious.  “Remains of trouble?”

“Not a vestige,” I laughed.

“That’s all right,” he said breezily.  “Now come along and hear Milligan speak.”

It did not occur to him that I might have work, worries, or engagements, or that the evening’s entertainment which he offered me might be the last thing I should appreciate.  His head, for the moment, was full of Milligan, and it seemed to him only natural that the head of all humanity should be full of Milligan too.  I made a wry face.

“That son of thunder?”

Milligan was a demagogue who had twice unsuccessfully attempted to get into Parliament in the Labour interest.

“Have you ever heard him?”

“Heaven forbid!” said I in my pride.

“Then come.  He’s speaking in the Hall of the Lambeth Biblical Society.”

I was tempted, as I wanted company.  In spite of my high resolve to out-Ishmael Ishmael, I could not kill a highly developed gregarious instinct.  I also wanted a text for an article.  But I wanted my dinner still more.  Campion condemned the idea of dinner.

“You can have a cold supper,” he roared, “like the rest of us.”

I yielded.  Campion dragged me helpless to a tram at the top of Vauxhall Bridge Road.

“It will do Your Mightiness good to mingle with the proletariat,” he grinned.

I did not tell him that I had been mingling with it in this manner for some time past or that I repudiated the suggestion of its benign influence.  I entered the tram meekly.  As soon as we were seated, he began: 

“I bet you won’t guess what I’ve done with your thousand pounds.  I’ll give you a million guesses.”

As I am a poor conjecturer, I put on a blank expression and shook my head.  He waited for an instant, and then shouted with an air of triumph: 

“I’ve founded a prize, my boy—­a stroke of genius.  I’ve called it by your name.  ‘The de Gex Prize for Housewives.’  I didn’t bother you about it as I knew you were in a world of worry.  But just think of it.  An annual prize of thirty pounds—­practically the interest—­for housewives!”

His eyes flashed in his enthusiasm; he brought his heavy hand down on my knee.

“Well?” I asked, not electrified by this announcement.

“Don’t you see?” he exclaimed.  “I throw the competition open to the women in the district, with certain qualifications, you know—­I look after all that.  They enter their names by a given date and then they start fair.  The woman who keeps her home tidiest and her children cleanest collars the prize.  Isn’t it splendid?”

I agreed.  “How many competitors?”

“Forty-three.  And there they are working away, sweeping their floors and putting up clean curtains and scrubbing their children’s noses till they shine like rubies and making their homes like little Dutch pictures.  You see, thirty pounds is a devil of a lot of money for poor people.  As one mother of a large family said to me, ’With that one could bury them all quite beautiful.’”