The young man set the paper bag he carried down on the littered round table and advanced to the girl who sat in an old wicker chair before the fire.  The girl did not turn her head as he kissed her cheek, and he looked down at something that had muffled the sound of his steps as he had approached her.

“Hallo, that’s new, isn’t it, Bessie?  Where did that come from?” he asked cheerfully.

The middle of the floor was covered with a common jute matting, but on the hearth was a magnificent leopard-skin rug.

“Mrs. Hepburn sent it up.  There was a draught from under the door.  It’s much warmer for my feet.”

“Very kind of Mrs. Hepburn.  Well, how are you feeling to-day, old girl?”

“Better, thanks, Ed.”

“That’s the style.  You’ll be yourself again soon.  Daisy says you’ve been out to-day?”

“Yes, I went for a walk.  But not far; I went to the Museum and then sat down.  You’re early, aren’t you?”

He turned away to get a chair, from which he had to move a mass of tissue-paper patterns and buckram linings.  He brought it to the rug.

“Yes.  I stopped last night late to cash up for Vedder, so he’s staying to-night.  Turn and turn about.  Well, tell us all about it, Bess.”

Their faces were red in the firelight.  Hers had the prettiness that the first glance almost exhausts, the prettiness, amazing in its quantity, that one sees for a moment under the light of the street lamps when shops and offices close for the day.  She was short-nosed, pulpy-mouthed and faunish-eyed, and only the rather remarkable smallness of the head on the splendid thick throat saved her from ordinariness.  He, too, might have been seen in his thousands at the close of any day, hurrying home to Catford or Walham Green or Tufnell Park to tea and an evening with a girl or in a billiard-room, or else dining cheaply “up West” preparatory to smoking cigarettes from yellow packets in the upper circle of a music-hall.  Four inches of white up-and-down collar encased his neck; and as he lifted his trousers at the knee to clear his purple socks, the pair of paper covers showed, that had protected his cuffs during the day at the office.  He removed them, crumpled them up and threw them on the fire; and the momentary addition to the light of the upper chamber showed how curd-white was that superb neck of hers and how moody and tired her eyes.

From his face only one would have guessed, and guessed wrongly, that his preferences were for billiard-rooms and music-halls.  His conversation showed them to be otherwise.  It was of Polytechnic classes that he spoke, and of the course of lectures in English literature that had just begun.  And, as if somebody had asserted that the pursuit of such studies was not compatible with a certain measure of physical development also, he announced that he was not sure that he should not devote, say, half an evening a week, on Wednesdays, to training in the gymnasium.