fect to the gleaming pale enamelled
furniture, and to the voluptuous engravings after Sir Frederick
Leighton, and the sweet, sentimental engravings after Marcus Stone,
and to the assorted knicknacks. The flat had homogeneity, for
everything in it, except the stove, had been bought at one shop in
Tottenham Court Road by a landlord who knew his business. The stove,
which was large, stood in the bedroom fireplace, and thence radiated
celestial comfort and security throughout the home; the stove was
the divinity of the home and Christine the priestess; she had herself
bought the stove, and she understood its personality--it was one of
your finite gods.

"Will you take something?" she asked, the hostess.

Whisky and a siphon and glasses were on the sideboard.

"Oh no, thanks!"

"Not even a cigarette?" Holding out the box and looking up at him,
she appealed with a long, anxious glance that he should honour her
cigarettes.

"Thank you!" he said. "I should like a cigarette very much."

She lit a match for him.

"But you--do you not smoke?"

"Yes. Sometimes."

"Try one of mine--for a change."

He produced a long, thin gold cigarette-case, stuffed with cigarettes.

She lit a cigarette from his.

"Oh!" she cried after a few violent puffs. "I like enormously your
cigarettes. Where are they to be found?"

"Look!" said he. "I will put these few in your box." And he poured
twenty cigarettes into an empty compartment of the box, which was
divided into two.

"Not all!" she protested.

"Yes."

"But I say NO!" she insisted with a gesture suddenly firm, and put a
single cigarette back into his case and shut the case with a snap, and
herself returned it to his pocket. "One ought never to be without a
cigarette."

He said:

"You understand life.... How nice it is here!" He looked about and
then sighed.

"But why do you sigh?"

"Sigh of content! I was just thinking this place would be something
else if an English girl had it. It is curious, lamentable, that
English girls understand nothing--certainly not love."

"As for that, I've always heard so."

"They understand nothing. Not even warmth. One is cold in their
rooms."

"As for that--I mean warmth--one may say that I understand it; I do."

"You understand more than warmth. What is your name?"

"Christine."

She was the accidental daughter of a daughter of joy. The mother, as
frequently happens in these cases, dreamed of perfect respectability
for her ch