Page 107 - tender-is-the-night

XVII

It was a house hewn from the frame of Cardinal de Retz’s
palace in the Rue Monsieur, but once inside the door there
was nothing of the past, nor of any present that Rosemary
knew. The outer shell, the masonry, seemed rather to enclose
the future so that it was an electric-like shock, a definite
nervous experience, perverted as a breakfast of oatmeal
and hashish, to cross that threshold, if it could be so called,
into the long hall of blue steel, silver-gilt, and the myriad
facets of many oddly bevelled mirrors. The effect was un-
like that of any part of the Decorative Arts Exhibition—for
there were people IN it, not in front of it. Rosemary had the
detached false-and-exalted feeling of being on a set and she
guessed that every one else present had that feeling too.
There were about thirty people, mostly women, and all
fashioned by Louisa M. Alcott or Madame de Ségur; and
they functioned on this set as cautiously, as precisely, as
does a human hand picking up jagged broken glass. Neither
individually nor as a crowd could they be said to domi-
nate the environment, as one comes to dominate a work of
art he may possess, no matter how esoteric, no one knew
what this room meant because it was evolving into some-
thing else, becoming everything a room was not; to exist
in it was as difficult as walking on a highly polished mov-
ing stairway, and no one could succeed at all save with the

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