Chapter XII

Mrs. Hegner leant her woe-begone, tear-stained
little face against the centre window-pane of
one of the two windows in her bedroom.

The room was a very large room. But she had
never liked it, large, spacious, and airy though it was.
You see, it was furnished entirely like a German bedroom,
not like a nice cosy English room. Thus the
place where a fireplace would naturally have been was
taken up by a large china stove; and instead of a big
brass double bed there were two low narrow box beds.
On her husband's bed was a huge eiderdown, and under
that only a sheet -- no blankets at all! Polly hoped that
this horrid fact would never be known in Witanbury.
It would make quite a talk.

There was linoleum on the floor instead of a carpet,
and there was very little ease about the one arm-
chair which her husband had grudgingly allowed her
to have up here.

Close to his bed, at right angles to it, was a huge
black and green safe. That safe, as Polly well knew,
had cost a very great deal of money, enough money
to have furnished this room in really first-class style,
with good Wilton pile carpet all complete.

But Manfred had chosen to furnish the room in
his own style, and it was a style to which Polly could
never grow accustomed. It outraged all the instinctive
prejudices and conventions inherited from her
respectable, lower middle-class forbears. Instead of

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v?