CHAPTER XXINothing in Jean's former experience of London had prepared her for the little bird-cagey house, facing Kensington Gardens, done up by friends of Char's, who after all weren't afraid of colour. The furniture was brilliantly painted with fruit and flowers, the curtains were exotic, and it would scarcely have surprised Jean if she had been met on the threshold of the drawing-room by a screaming jay. The boredom of foggy squares and musty museums, of drab, dim weeks in Ladbroke Grove with a sister of her mother's, who expected Jean to sustain life on vegetable curries and to communicate chiefly with the Dead through the uncertain medium of the alphabet and a rickety table, gave way suddenly to the splendours of the Thousand and One Nights.
Jean hadn't dreamed, when Beatrice plainti
