Chapter 3

THE FLAT

Her flat was in Cork Street.  As soon as they entered it the man remarked on its warmth and its cosiness, so agreeable after the November streets.  Christine only smiled.  It was a long, narrow flat—­a small sitting-room with a piano and a sideboard, opening into a larger bedroom shaped like a thick L. The short top of the L, not cut off from the rest of the room, was installed as a cabinet de toilette, but it had a divan.  From the divan, behind which was a heavily curtained window, you could see right through the flat to the curtained window of the sitting-room.  All the lights were softened by paper shades of a peculiar hot tint between Indian red and carmine, giving a rich, romantic effect 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.”