mforts, as she pictured herself so well able to do.
After due deliberation, she delivered her opinion.

"I don't think the green would go so badly as you'd think," she said
slowly--"I suppose it would be expensive to change. But red would
look better of course."

He took his pipe out of his mouth and blew a long scroll of smoke
from between his lips as he looked at her.

"In fact," he said at last--"you'd like to make this little room of
mine look like hell."

It was a brutal thing to have said. Yet he knew her mind no more than
she knew his. He knew but little of women. Her knowledge of men was
limited to one point of view. When her flat had been newly decorated,
newly furnished for her, she had boasted of its comforts to every
man she met. Nearly all of them had said that they liked it. It was
clean then, and all they had appreciated was the cleanliness. But
she had not known that. She thought they had approved of her taste.
So, with this narrow knowledge of the sex, she had made her bid for
security and failed.

And he, when he saw the drop in her face, when he saw features and
expression fall from the lofty height of anticipation as a pile of
cards topple in a mass upon the table, he was sorry. Her mouth
opened--gaped. She looked as if a flat hand had struck her.

"I don't mean that unkindly," he said--"but it would be hell--red
hell--to me."

She sat and stared at him. "Can't understand you," she said at last.

"Why not?"

"What did you let me go on talking for?"

"It was rather amusing to compare your taste with mine."

"Amusing? God!"

She lifted herself to her feet and went across to the mantelpiece,
leaning her elbows on it, her head in her hands. All her exhaustion
had returned. She felt a thousand times more tired in that moment
than when she had rested on the landing. All that afternoon she had
been walking the streets--all that evening too. From Regent Street
to Oxford Street, from Oxford Street to Bond Street, from Bond Street
through the Burlington Arcade into Piccadilly, then over the whole
course again, smiling cheerfully at this man, looking knowingly at
that--all a forced effort, all a spurious energy; and pain throbbed
in her limbs--a dominant note of pain. She could feel a pulse in her
brain that kept time to it. These are the ecstatic pleasures of
vice--the charms, the allurements of the gay life.

At last she turned round and faced him. "I don't want any of those
damned red carpe