"I just don't like to think of all sorts of dirty Turks and Arabs having
used them," she protested. "Slept on them, walked on them, spilled
things on the--? ugh!"

"But the colors, Natalie dear! The old faded 'copper-tones, the
dull-blues, the dead-rose! There is a beauty about age, you know. Lovely
as you are, you'll be even lovelier as an old woman."

"I'm getting there rather rapidly."

He turned and looked at her critically. No slightest aid that she had
given her beauty missed his eyes, the delicate artificial lights in her
hair, her eyebrows drawn to a hair's breadth and carefully arched, the
touch of rouge under her eyes and on the lobes of her ears. But she was
beautiful, no matter what art had augmented her real prettiness. She was
a charming, finished product, from her veil and hat to her narrowly
shod feet. He liked finished things, well done. He liked the glaze on a
porcelain; he liked the perfect lacquering on the Chinese screen he had
persuaded Natalie to buy; he preferred wood carved into the fine lines
of Sheraton to the trees that grow in the Park, for instance, through
which they were driving.

A Sheraton sideboard was art. Even certain forms of Colonial mahogany
were art, although he was not fond of them. And Natalie was--art. Even
if she represented the creative instincts of her dressmaker and her
milliner, and not her own--he did not like a Louis XV sofa the less that
it had not carved itself.