gesture of childlike glee expressing her satisfaction in the flat as a
whole.

The flat was dark; she did not object, loving artificial light. The
rooms were all very small; she loved cosiness. There was a garage
close by, which might have disturbed her nights; but it did not. The
bathroom was open to the bedroom; no arrangement could be better. G.J.
in enumerating the disadvantages of the flat had said also that it
was too much and too heavily furnished. Not at all. She adored the
cumbrous and rich furniture; she did not want in her flat the empty
spaces of a ball-room; she wanted to feel that she was within an
interior--inside something. She gloried in the flat. She preferred it
even to her memory of G.J.'s flat in the Albany. Its golden ornateness
flattered her. The glittering cornices, and the big carved frames
of the pictures of impossible flowers and of ladies and gentlemen in
historic coiffures and costumes, appeared marvellous to her. She had
never seen, and certainly had never hoped to inhabit, anything like
it. But then Gilbert was always better than his word.

He had been quite frank, telling her that he knew of the existence of
the flat simply because it had been occupied for a brief time by the
Mrs. Carlos Smith of whom she had heard and read, and who had had to
leave it on account of health. (She did not remind him that once at
the beginning of the war when she had noticed the name and portrait of
Mrs. Carlos Smith in the paper, he, sitting by her side, had concealed
from her that he knew Mrs. Carlos Smith. Judiciously, she had never
made the slightest reference to that episode.) Though she detested
the unknown Mrs. Carlos Smith, she admired and envied her for a great
illustrious personage, and was secretly very proud of succeeding Mrs.
Carlos Smith in the tenancy. And when Gilbert told her that he had had