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Rh She showed him her apartment, the bar, narrow and white; the dining room, with ivory chairs about a long black board; the bedrooms, two, one hers; the other for him, she said.

Her bedroom, haven of repose, high four-square bed of cream, green shades and curtains, a low white lamp. The door open.

His bedroom … plaids, deep browns. "For my men friends. Now for my man friend."

Her words wove a spell. She talked about Paris and the artist who had designed these rooms. She confided that he was not the first man she had befriended. But he would be, she insisted, the last.

She talked, as the coffee boiled, as its pungent heaviness wakened him.

"Of love, I have but one opinion," she said. "Love is beauty. Beauty must be worshiped. Fm a pagan, in that respect, darling. I believe in consecrating myself to Venus. My bed is my shrine and you are to be my high priest.

"That's saying an awful lot of words to express a very simple feeling." The quick smile flashed. He was calm and happy. And tired, very tired.

Tenderly, tenderly she had spoken. A single lamp in her room. Water flooding a bath compartment. Over his mind the lifting haze of a storm that is gone.

The bathroom was wide and deep. Marble floor upon which his feet rested, cool marble, making his feet cooler than the rest of him.

A glass door to the bath. Before the door, a table. Colored salt crystals in square bottles. A narrow-necked bottle encased in a basket contained fragrant Sweet William