I nodded doubtful assent. Hermione Street has been, within the last three years, improved out of any man’s knowledge. The name exists still, but not one brick or stone of the old Hermione Street is left now. It was the old street he meant, for he said:

‘There was a row of two-storied brick houses on the left, with their backs against the wing of a great public building—you remember. Would it surprise you very much to hear that one of these houses was for a time the centre of anarchist propaganda and of what you would call underground action?’

‘Not at all,’ I protested. Hermione Street had never been particularly respectable, as I remembered it.

‘The house was the property of a distinguished government official,’^* he added, sipping his champagne.

‘Oh, indeed!’ I said, this time not believing a word of it.

‘Of course he was not living there,’ Mr X continued. ‘But from ten till four he sat next door to it, the dear man, in his well-appointed private room in the wing of the public building I’ve mentioned. To be strictly accurate, I must explain that the house in Hermione Street perhaps did not really belong to him. It belonged to his grown-up children^*—a daughter and a son. The girl, a fine figure, was by no means vulgarly pretty. To more personal charm than mere youth could account for, she added the seductive appearance of enthusiasm, of independence, of courageous thought. I suppose she put them on as she put on her picturesque dresses and for the same reason: to assert her individuality at any cost. You know, women would go to any length almost for such a purpose. She went to a great length. She had acquired all the appropriate gestures^* of revolutionary convictions;—the gestures of pity, of anger, of indignation against the anti-humanitarian vices of the social class to which she belonged herself. All this sat on her striking personality as well as her slightly original costumes. Very slightly original; just enough to mark a protest against the philistinism of the overfed taskmasters of the poor. Just enough, and no more. It would not have done to go too far in that direction—you understand. But she was of age, and nothing stood in the way of her offering her house to the revolutionary workers.’

‘You don’t mean it!’ I cried.

‘I assure you,’ he affirmed, ‘that she made that extremely effective gesture. How else could they have got hold of it? The cause is not rich. And, moreover, there would have been difficulties with any ordinary house-agent, who would have wanted references and so on. The group she came in contact with through going about in the poor quarters of the town (you know the gesture of charity and personal service which was so fashionable some years ago) accepted with gratitude. The first advantage was that Hermione Street is, as you know, miles away from the suspect part of the town, specially watched by the police.

‘The ground floor consisted of a little Italian restaurant, of the flyblown sort. There was no difficulty in buying the proprietor out. A woman and a man belonging to the group took it on. The man had been a cook. The comrades could get their meals there, unnoticed amongst the other customers. This was another advantage. The first floor was occupied by a shabby Variety Artists’ Agency—an agency for performers in inferior music-halls, you know. A fellow called Bomm, I remember. He was not disturbed. It was rather favourable than otherwise to have a lot of foreign-looking people, jugglers, acrobats, singers of both sexes, and so on, going in and out all day long. The police paid no attention to new faces, you see. The top floor happened, most conveniently, to stand empty then.’

X interrupted himself to attack impassively, with measured movements, a bombe glacée^* which the waiter had just set down on the table. He swallowed carefully a few spoonfuls of the iced stuff, and asked me, ‘Did you ever hear of Stone’s Dried Soup?’

‘Hear of what?’ I asked, completely put off.

‘It was,’ X pursued evenly, ‘a comestible article, once rather prominently advertised in the dailies, but which never, somehow, gained the favour of the public. The enterprise fizzled out, as you say here.