“You talk so lightly about taking things,” she said.
“I don’t feel quite so lightly about it,” I admitted. “But I’m not sure that that’s virtue—it’s more likely merely habit. And an obstinate refusal to face facts isn’t going to bring anything back, or help us at all. I think we’ll have to try to see ourselves not as the robbers of all this but more as—well, the unwilling heirs to it.”
“Yes. I suppose it is—something like that,” she agreed in a qualified way.
She was silent for a time. When she spoke again she reverted to the earlier question.
“And after the clothes?” she asked.
“Operation Number Three,” I told her, “is, quite definitely, dinner.”
* * *
—
There was, as I had expected, no great difficulty about the apartment. We left the car locked up in the middle of the road in front of an opulent-looking block and climbed to the third story. Quite why we chose the third I can’t say, except that it seemed a bit more out of the way. The process of selection was simple. We knocked or we rang, and if anyone answered, we passed on. After we had passed on three times we found a door where there was no response. The socket of the rim lock tore off to one good heft of the shoulder, and we were in.
I myself had not been one of those addicted to living in an apartment with a rent of some two thousand pounds a year, but I found that there were decidedly things to be said in favor of it. The interior decorators had been, I guessed, elegant young men with just that ingenious gift for combining taste with advanced topicality which is so expensive. Consciousness of fashion was the mainspring of the place. Here and there were certain unmistakable derniers cris, some of them undoubtedly destined—had the world pursued its expected course—to become the rage of tomorrow; others, I would say, a dead loss from their very inception. The over-all effect was Trade Fair in its neglect of human foibles—a book left a few inches out of place or with the wrong color on its jacket would ruin the whole carefully considered balance and tone—so, too, would the person thoughtless enough to wear the wrong clothes when sitting upon the wrong luxurious chair or sofa. I turned to Josella, who was staring wide-eyed at it all.
“Will this little shack serve—or do we go farther?” I asked.
“Oh, I guess we’ll make out,” she said. And together we waded through the delicate cream carpet to explore.
It was quite uncalculated, but I could scarcely have hit upon a more satisfactory method of taking her mind off the events of the day. Our tour was punctuated with a series of exclamations in which admiration, envy, delight, contempt, and, one must confess, malice all played their parts. Josella paused on the threshold of a room rampant with all the most aggressive manifestations of femininity.
“I’ll sleep here,” she said.
“My God!” I remarked. “Well, each to her taste.”
“Don’t be nasty. I probably won’t have another chance to be decadent. Besides, don’t you know there’s a bit of the dumbest film star in every girl? So I’ll let it have its final fling.”
“You shall,” I said. “But I hope they keep something quieter around here. Heaven preserve me from having to sleep in a bed with a mirror set in the ceiling over it.”
“There’s one above the bath too,” she said, looking into an adjoining room.
“I don’t know whether that would be the zenith or nadir of decadence,” I said. “But anyway, you’ll not be using it. No hot water.”
“Oh, I’d forgotten that. What a shame!” she exclaimed disappointedly.
We completed our tour of the premises, finding the rest less sensational. Then she went out to deal with the matter of clothes. I made an inspection of the apartment’s resources and limitations and then set out on an expedition of my own.