40ti ANGEL PAVEMENT

along the landings and in and out of their little bed-
rooms.

Miss Matfield went up to her little room, found a
space on the wall for two framed Medici prints she had
brought back from home, cleared out of her tiny book-
shelf several books she had borrowed and forgotten to
return, and put in their place some books she had con-
trived to borrow during the holidays. There were two
travel books and three novels or romances, and all three
stories had for their settings such places as Borneo and
the South Seas. This was not a mere coincidence. Miss
Matfield liked her fiction to be full of jungles, coral
reefs, plantations, lagoons, hibiscus flowers, the scent of
vanilla, schooners on the wide Pacific, tropical nights.
So long as the young man was first shown to her dressed
in white and lounging on a verandah, while a noiseless
brown figure brought him something long and cool to
drink, she was ready to follow his love story to the end.
If the story had no love in it but had the right exotic set-
ting, she would read it, but she preferred a fairly strong
love interest. She had not bad taste, and if the story was
written for her by Joseph Conrad, so much the better;
but she was ready to endure if not to delight in authors
of a very different cut from Conrad if they would only
give her the jungles and lagoons and coral reefs and
mysterious brown faces. The worst story about
Malaysia was preferable to the best story about
Marylebone. She did all her reading on the bus to and
from the office, in some teashop at lunch time, and in
bed, and as her one desire was to escape from any further
consideration of buses, teashops and girls' club bed-
rooms, these stories of the other end of the world,
strange, savage, beautiful, might have been specially