* 7

Next to the fireplace was a narrow flight of carpeted stairs leading up to two bedrooms and a small study. The banister and rail posts harkened back to the days of the artists and were fancifully carved; the newel post featured the bulbous head of a Viking chieftain.
Janice’s eyes lovingly moved across the treasured corners of her world and, as always, finally came to rest on the pièce de résistance – the one item that had plunged them recklessly ahead on the perilous course of buying the apartment; the ceiling.
Deeply panelled in variety of rare woods, varnished to a high lustre, the ceiling was a magnificent work of art. Two large paintings, wrought by the brush of a true master, had been set into the woodwork, dividing the ceiling into two parts. Janice discovered, after research, that the paintings were in the tradition of Fragonard, featuring woodland nymphs cavorting licentiously in cool, shaded glades. It was a stunning, breathtaking sight that literally startled new guests, and Bill and Janice loved playing it down, pretending to accept the ceiling as a matter of course, sometimes even expressing slight irritation at its gaudy vulgarity.
But alone, they would lie together on the hearth rug, holding hands and gazing spellbound at their ceiling museum, themselves stunned at the fantastic luck of having found and acquired such a treasure so soon after their marriage. They had rushed into buying the apartment just as they had rushed into marriage, impatient to get started on their lives together.
Devoted opera fans, Janice and Bill first met at a matinee of La Traviata in San Francisco. Both were in school at the time, Janice completing her senior year at Architectural University in Berkeley and Bill doing graduate work at San Francisco State. Each was pot lucking for a single that blustery Saturday afternoon,