“Upholstered in red?” he repeated.

“Um—­of course.”

“Then how about this wall-paper?” he questioned.  “It’s green—­do you think that would go with all the red?”

She looked round the walls, then tried to blur her eyes in an effort to give scope to her imagination.  She put her whole heart into it.  This was the chance of her life.  Thrilling through her, like some warm current that forces its way through cold water, was the consciousness that she was making him seriously consider the benefits of having a woman to live with him, to look after his needs, attend to his comforts, 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.