rosewood
tea-table (spread, for the heightening of the illusion, with a
tea-service all complete); when she pretended to pour out tea, smiling
over the tea-pot in the prettiest delight. With such a smile she would
welcome him, with such a smile she would pour out his tea when he came
back from Fleet Street to the home that was to be. (It did not occur
to him that at the moment Flossie was only smiling at the tea-pot.)
Though he stood aloof from the anticipatory scene, as he looked at her
he grew positively weak with tenderness. In everything Flossie had her
way. When they climbed (as they inevitably did) to the upper galleries
he indeed offered some show of resistance when she insisted on
choosing a terrible bedstead of brass with mother-o'-pearl ornaments.
But to do him justice, it was sheer nervous terror which prompted the
brutal remark that, "Really, mother-o'-pearl ornaments were more than
he could stand"; for he melted and gave in at once at the sight of
Flossie feeling the rosy down coverlet with her little hands. When
their eyes met, Flossie's face was as rosy as the coverlet; so that
the attendant spirit of commerce himself turned from them abashed.
That there would, that there must be, such a moment Keith had had a
horrible foreboding as he followed up the stairs.

Nobody could have been more happy than Flossie following the dream in
Tottenham Court Road; and Rickman was happy because she was. Happy for
a whole fortnight; and then for the first time they quarrelled.

And this was how it happened. They were going to live at Ealing; not
because they liked it, but because the neighbourhood was cheap.
Flossie had said, "When we're rich, we'll go to Kensington"; and he
had answered with an odious flippancy, "Yes, and when we die we'll go
to heaven"; but for the present, Flossie (wise Flossie who loved
economy even more than Kensington) was content with Ealing. That she
was obliged to be content with it made her feel, naturally, that she
was entitled to gratification on every other point. It was not over
Ealing, then, that they quarrelled, but over the choosing of the
house. Flossie was all for a gay little brand-new, red-brick villa,
with nice clean white paint about it, only two minutes from the tram;
he for a little old-fashioned brown-brick house with jasmine all over
it, and a garden all grass and lilac bushes at the back. He said the
garden would be nice to sit in. She said, what was the good of sitting
in