I only mention this to explain how it has come to pass that Lola and I
are now all-powerful in Barbara's Building. It has become the child of
our adoption and we love it with a deep and almost fanatic affection.
Before Lola my influence and personality fade into nothingness. She is
the power, the terror, the adoration of Lambeth. If she chose she
could control the Parliamentary vote of the borough. Her great, direct,
large-hearted personality carries all before it. And with it there is
something of the uncanny. A feat of hers in the early days is by way of
becoming legendary.
A woman, on the books of the Building, was about to bring a hopeless
human fragment into a grey world. Lola went to see what aid the Building
could provide. In front of the door lounged the husband, a hulking
porter in a Bermondsey factory. Glowering at his feet lay a vicious
mongrel dog--bull-terrier, Irish-terrier, mastiff--so did Lola with
her trained eye distinguish the strains. When she asked for his wife in
travail the chivalrous gentleman took his pipe from his mouth, spat, and
after the manner of his kind referred to the disfigurement of her face
in terms impossible to transcribe.
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