“Well, you see I do—in a way!”
“What! A business of bidding at auctions?”
“Oh, no,” she laughed, “my ‘business’ is apartments!”
“Apartments!”
She had put on her gold-rimmed nippers, and they straddled her nose in a humorous, faintly pompous manner. “It’s the only way I can gratify my craving for rare and ‘intriguing’ possessions! You see I take an apartment, furnish it with all the lovely ‘things’ I couldn’t afford for myself, and then turn the key over to a tenant who will pay me the difference!” Her face displayed tokens of the anxiety which belonged to an at length pretty involved background of sub-leased domiciles. “Of course,” she confessed, speaking now slowly, almost cosily, “it’s always a pang to move out, though there’s the new apartment to begin ‘planning,’ and then,” her voice dropping a little and her eyes smiling in a deliciously sly way behind their friendly nippers, “I sometimes just have to slip a few things along with me—my tendency is to ‘over-furnish’ anyhow.”
He by no means missed the note of pathos in her brave little scheme; yet she had assured him, too: “You’d be surprised how settled I manage to feel in the midst of what, of course, in one sense, doesn’t really belong to me!”
“That’s the only home you have, then—the home that only lasts until it’s furnished?”
“Yes,” she slowly admitted, “I’m afraid so. Sometimes there does seem a good deal of ‘irony’ deep down underneath everything!”
“Ah!” sighed the impresario, though a radiant smile broke through in spite of him, “no one understands such things better than I. Life’s just full of irony, isn’t it?—whichever way you turn!”