She was on intimate terms
with keepers and animals, and her curious magnetism allowed her to play
such tricks with lions and tigers and other ferocious beasts as made
my blood run cold. As for the bears, they greeted her approach with
shrieking demonstrations of affection. On such occasions I felt the same
curious physical antipathy as I did when she had dominated Anastasius's
ill-conditioned cat. She seemed to enter another sphere of being in
which neither I nor anything human had a place.
With some such dim thoughts in my head, I reached her door in Cadogan
Gardens. The sight of her electric brougham that stood waiting switched
my thoughts into another groove, but one running oddly parallel.
Electric broughams also carried her out of my sphere. I had humbly
performed the journey thither in an omnibus.
She received me in her big, expansive way.
"Lord! How good it is to see you. I was getting the--I was going to say
'the blind hump'--but you don't like it. I was going to turn crazy and
bite the furniture.
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