side
of that very landlordism which I had been denouncing up and down the
East-End. The difference was plain enough, of course; but when you
worked down to principle, it became for me a pretty delicate
difference to explain. I was pledged, however, to return to London
after Christmas and run (as Jimmy Collingwood put it) for those
Bethnal Green Stakes: and in due time--that's to say, about the
middle of January--up I came.

I won't bore you with my political campaign. One day in the middle
of it Jimmy said, "To-night's a night off and we're dining with Jack
Foe down in Chelsea. Eight o'clock: no theatre afterwards: 'no band,
no promenade, no nozzing.' We've arranged between us to give your
poor tired brain a rest."

"When you do happen to be thoughtful," said I "you might give me a
little longer warning. As it is, I made a half-promise yesterday, to
speak for that man of ours, Farrell, across the water."

"No, you don't," said Jimmy. "Who's Farrell? Friend of yours?"

"Tottenham Court Road," I said. "Only met him yesterday."

"What? Peter Farrell's Hire System? . . . And you met him there, in
the Tottenham Court Road--by appointment, I suppose, with a coy
carnation in your buttonhole. A bad young baronet, unmarried,
intellectual, with a craving for human sympathy, on the Hire
System'--"

"Don't be an ass, Jimmy," said I. "He's a Progressive, and they tell
me his seat's dicky."

"They mostly are in the Tottenham Court Road," said Jimmy. "But if
you've made half a promise, I was a week ahead of you with a whole
one. We dine with Jack Foe."

The night was a beast. Foe's flat, high up on a block overlooking
the Chelsea embankment, fairly rocked under squalls of a cross-river
wind. He had moved into these new quarters while I was down in
Warwickshire, and the man who put in the windows had scamped his job.
The sashes rattled diabolically. Now that's just the sort of thing
he'd have asked me to see to before he installed himself, if I had
been up at the time: or, rather, I should have seen to it without
being asked. That kind of noise never affected _him_: he could just
withdraw himself into his work and forget it. But different noises
get on different men's nerves, and, next to the scratching of a
slate-pencil, a window on the rattle or the distant slam-slam of a
door left ajar makes me craziest. You'd think a man out here would
get accustomed to anything in the way of racket. Not a bit of it