k and gold, and the railings of the balcony were black
and gold with crimson shape like squares wildly out of drawing.

Lady Sunderbund kept him waiting perhaps five minutes. Then she came
sailing in to him.

She was dressed in a way and moved across the room in a way that was
more reminiscent of Botticelli's Spring than ever--only with a kind
of superadded stiffish polonaise of lace--and he did not want to be
reminded of Botticelli's Spring or wonder why she had taken to stiff
lace polonaises. He did not enquire whether he had met Lady Sunderbund
to better advantage at Mrs. Garstein Fellows' or whether his memory had
overrated her or whether anything had happened to his standard of taste,
but his feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the
talk and self-examination he had promised himself seemed to wither and
hide away within him. For a time he talked of her view, and then
admired her room and its arrangement, which he thought really were quite
unbecomingly flippant and undignified for a room. Then came the black
tea-things on their orange tray, and he searched in his mind for small
talk to sustain their interview.

But he had already betrayed his disposition to "go on with our talk"
in his telephone enquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving his shyness,
began to make openings for him, at first just little hinting openings,
and then larger and larger ones, until at last one got him.

"I'm so glad," she said, "to see you again. I'm so glad to go on with
our talk. I've thought about it and thought about it."

She beamed at him happily.

"I've thought ova ev'y wo'd you said," she went on, when she had
finished conveying her pretty bliss to him. "I've been so helped by
thinking the k'eeds are symbols. And all you said. And I've felt time
after time, you couldn't stay whe' you we'. That what you we' saying to
me, would have to be said 'ight out."

That brought him in. He could not very well evade that opening without
incivility. After all he had asked to see her, and it was a foolish
thing to let little decorative accidentals put him off his friendly
purpose. A woman may have flower-pots painted gold with black checkers
and still be deeply understanding. He determined to tell her what was in
his mind. But he found something barred him from telling that he had
had an actual vision of God. It was as if that had been a private and
confidential meeting. It wasn't, he felt, for him either to boast a
privi