r."

_Wallpapers_

Life is full of minor mysteries--conundrums of the everyday which usually
centre round the problem: "Why on earth people do certain things and what
on earth makes them do them?" And one of these mysteries is that of
their choice in wallpapers. Of course some wallpapers are so pretty that
it is not at all difficult to realise why people chose them. On the
other hand, some are so extraordinarily hideous that one would really
like to see, for curiosity's sake, the artist who designed them and the
purchaser whose artistic needs they satisfied. Those bunches of
impossible flowers linked together by ribbons, the whole painted in
horrible combinations of colour--how we all know them, and how we marvel
at their creation! One imagines the mental difficulty of the purchaser
as to which among the many designs most appealed to her artistic "eye."
Then one pictures how her choice wavered among several. One figures to
oneself how she sat in consultation with that friend whom most people
take with them when they go out to choose wallpapers, asking her opinion
concerning the design which showed nightmare birds swarming about among
terrible trees, and the one which illustrated brown roses with blue buds
growing in regulated bunches on trellis-work of a most bilious green.
One can almost hear the arguments for and against, and at last, the
definite conclusion that the one with the brown roses and blue buds was
the more uncommon--therefore the better of the two. And one day fate
leads your steps towards the bedroom wherein that wallpaper hangs. As
you throw yourself into the one easy chair you take out your cigarette
case to enjoy that "just one more" which is the more enjoyable because it
symbolises that feeling of being "enfin seul" which always follows
conversations with landladies or several hours making yourselves
agreeable to hostesses.

Then you see it!

At first you are amusedly contemptuous. "How perfectly hideous," you say
to yourself. And then, in your idleness of mind, your eye follows the
roses and ribbons in horrible contortions from the skirting board to the
ceiling. Realising what you are doing, and knowing that in that
direction madness lies, you immediately turn your gaze towards the
window. You imagine that you have gained the day. But, alas! _you are
wrong_! Comes a moment in the early morning when you wake up two hours
before you wanted to, with nothing else to do except to l