room or whatever it is that Celia
means by fixtures. These things will arrange themselves somehow, I feel
confident.

Meanwhile the decorators are hard at work. A thrill of pride inflates me
when I think of the decorators at work. I don't know how they got there;
I suppose I must have ordered them. Celia says that _she_ ordered them
and chose all the papers herself, and that all I did was to say that the
papers she had chosen were very pretty; but this doesn't sound like me
in the least. I am convinced that I was the man of action when it came
to ordering decorators.

"And now," said Celia one day, "we can go and choose the electric-light
fittings."

"Celia," I said in admiration, "you're a wonderful person. I should have
forgotten all about them."

"Why, they're about the most important thing in the flat."

"Somehow I never regarded anybody as choosing them. I thought they just
grew in the wall. From bulbs."

When we got into the shop Celia became businesslike at once.

"We'd better start with the hall," she told the man.

"Everybody else will have to," I said, "so we may as well."

"What sort of a light did you want there?" he asked.

"A strong one," I said; "so as to be able to watch our guests carefully
when they pass the umbrella-stand."

Celia waved me away and explained that we wanted a hanging lantern. It
appeared that this shop made a speciality not so much of the voltage as
of the lamps enclosing it.

"How do you like that?" asked the man, pointing to a magnificent affair
in brass. He wandered off to a switch, and turned it on.

"Dare you ask him the price?" I asked Celia. "It looks to me about a
thousand pounds. If it is, say that you don't like the style. Don't let
him think we can't afford it."

"Yes," said Celia, in a careless sort of way. "I'm not sure that I care
about that. How much is it?"

"Two pounds."

I was not going to show my relief. "Without the light, of course?" I
said disparagingly.

"How do you think it would look in the hall?" said Celia to me.

"I think our guests would be encouraged to proceed. They'd see that we
were pretty good people."

"I don't like it. It's too ornate."

"Then show us something less ornate," I told the man sternly.

He showed us things less ornate. At the end of an hour Celia said she
thought we'd better get on to another room, and come back to the hall
afterwards. We decided to proceed to the drawing-room.

"We must go all out over these