garden. Now and then he would ring up
to know whether she preferred salmon pink to _fraise ecrasee_ cushions,
or he would come up to the hotel rent in twain by conflicting rugs. At
last he had pronounced the house ready, and, after supplying it with
Mary and Charlotte, had triumphantly installed his new queen in her
palace.

Victoria's first revelation was one of immense joy; unquestioning, and
for one moment quite disinterested. It was not until a few hours had
elapsed that she regained mastery over herself. She went from room to
room punching cushions, pressing her hands over the polished wood, at
times feeling voluptuously on hands and knees the pile of the carpets.
She almost loved Cairns at the moment. It was quite honestly that she
drew him down by her side on the red and white sofa and softly kissed
his cheek and drove his ragged moustache into rebellion. It was quite
willingly too that she felt his grasp tighten on her and that she
yielded to him. Her lips did not abhor his kisses.

Some hours later she became herself again. Cairns was good to her, but
good as the grazier is to the heifer from whom he hopes to breed; she
was his creature, and must be well housed, well fed, well clothed, so
that his eyes might feast on her, scented so that his desire for her
might be whipped into action. In her moments of cold horror in the past
she had realised herself as a commodity, as a beast of burden; now she
realised herself as a beast of pleasure. The only thing to remember then
was to coin into gold her condescension.

Victoria looked at herself again in the glass. Yes, it was
condescension. As a free woman, that is, a woman of means, she would
never have surrendered to Cairns the tips of her fingers. Off the coast
of Araby she had yielded to him a little, so badly did she need human
sympathy, a little warmth in the cold of the lonely night. When he
appeared again as the rescuer she had flung herself into his arms with
an appalling fetterless joy. She had plunged her life into his as into
Nirvana.

Now her head was cooler. Indeed it had been cool for a month. She saw
Cairns as an average man, neither good nor evil, a son of his father and
the seed thereof, bound by a strict code of honour and a lax code of
morals. She saw him as a dull man with the superficial polish that even
the roughest pebble acquires in the stream of life. He had found her at
low water mark, stranded and gasping on the sands; he had picked her u