Fanny’s flat was small, but pleasantly clean and modern. After the picturesque but rather dingy antiquity of his large eighteenth-century panelled room, George found it delightful to be in bright-painted clean rooms with a white-tiled bathroom. Among Fanny’s many remarkable efficiencies was the genius of discovering excellent flats at a fabulously cheap rental, furnishing them charmingly for about five pounds and running them perfectly without the slightest fuss. She generally shifted her quarters about every six months, and invariably for the better. How pleasant is efficiency in others, especially when you are rather inefficient yourself! I wouldn’t exactly say that George was inefficient, but the details of material life rather bored him. When you had so much else to do and so little time to do it in, he thought it rather a waste of life to be too pernickety about one’s surroundings and fixings. However, he decided then and there that he and Elizabeth would have to get out of Soho. It was too disgustingly frowzy. Fanny was a marvelous lover. Or, at least, George thought so. It was not only that she was golden and supple and lithe, where Elizabeth was dark and rather stiff and virginal, but she really cared about love-making. It was her art. It was for her neither a painful duty nor a degrading necessity nor a series of disappointing experiments, but a delightful art which gave full expression to her vitality, energy and efficiency. Like all great artists, she was entirely disinterested—art for art’s sake. She chose her lovers with great care, and rather preferred them to be poor, to avoid any suspicion of commercialism or arrivism. She knew she had the genius of touch, and was unwilling that it should be wasted. If she hadn’t been a great lover, she might have been a good sculptor. But like all artists she was exacting, and had her vanity. She would not waste her talents. If a subject was not profoundly responsive and appreciative, she put him aside at the earliest possible moment. No clumsy, inhibited Englishman for her! No, thank you. Perhaps that is why she spent so much of her time abroad. But this particular Englishman was not inhibited or ineradicably clumsy. Crude perhaps, rather lacking in style and finish, but capable of rapid progress under expert guidance. Fanny, with the artist’s unerring glance, had long ago perceived that there were considerable possibilities in George. He had natural aptitudes and, what is far more important, the sense of delicate artistry which finds its highest satisfaction in bestowing delight. He was neither a bull nor a turkey gobbler. Fanny was satisfied; she had not made a mistake.... * * * * *