else. And yet it is the sort of thing that has happened, once or
twice at least, to half the men in London who have been in a
position to make it possible. Let me try and give you its peculiar
effect. Man or woman, you ought to know of it.

Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of
streets that lies about Tottenham Court Road, a dingy bedroom lit by
a solitary candle and carpeted with scraps and patches, with
curtains of cretonne closing the window, and a tawdry ornament of
paper in the grate. I sit on a bed beside a weary-eyed, fair-
haired, sturdy young woman, half undressed, who is telling me in
broken German something that my knowledge of German is at first
inadequate to understand. . . .

I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the
meaning came to me. She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and
she was telling me--just as one tells something too strange for
comment or emotion--how her father had been shot and her sister
outraged and murdered before her eyes.

It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous
beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life. There was I, you
know, the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite
brilliantly about politics and might presently get into Parliament,
with my collar and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful
adventure fading out of my mind.

"Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a
moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten
and remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.