waste paper basket a bouquet that must have been Poppy's too, it was
so enormous. And on the table in the window a Japanese flower-bowl
that served as a handy receptacle for cigarette ash and spent vestas.
Two immense mirrors facing each other reflected these objects and
Poppy, when she was there, for ever and ever, in diminishing
perspective. But Poppy was not there.

Passing through this brilliant scene into the back room beyond, he
found her finishing her supper.

Poppy was not at all surprised to see him. She addressed him as
"Rickets," and invited him under that name to sit down and have some
supper, too.

But Rickets did not want any supper. He sat down at the clear end of
the table, and looked on as in a dream. And when Poppy had finished
she came and sat by him on the clear end of the table, and made
cigarettes, and drank champagne out of a little tumbler.

"Thought you might feel a little lonely over there, Ricky-ticky," said
she.

Poppy was in spirits. If she had yielded to the glad impulse of her
heart, she would have stood on one foot and twirled the other over
Ricky-ticky's head. But she restrained herself. Somehow, before
Ricky-ticky, Poppy never played any of those tricks that delighted Mr.
Pilkington and other gentlemen of her acquaintance. She merely sat on
the table. She was in her ballet-dress, and before sitting on the
table she arranged her red skirts over her black legs with a
prodigious air of propriety. Poppy herself did not know whether this