Page 339 - swanns-way

flanked the pathway from the street to her house, and as he
went back to his carriage thrust it into his hand. He held it
pressed to his lips during the drive home, and when, in due
course, the flower withered, locked it away, like something
very precious, in a secret drawer of his desk.
He would escort her to her gate, but no farther. Twice
only had he gone inside to take part in the ceremony—of
such vital importance in her life —of ‘afternoon tea.’ The
loneliness and emptiness of those short streets (consisting,
almost entirely, of low-roofed houses, self-contained but not
detached, their monotony interrupted here and there by the
dark intrusion of some sinister little shop, at once an histor-
ical document and a sordid survival from the days when the
district was still one of ill repute), the snow which had lain
on the garden-beds or clung to the branches of the trees, the
careless disarray of the season, the assertion, in this man-
made city, of a state of nature, had all combined to add an
element of mystery to the warmth, the flowers, the luxury
which he had found inside.
Passing by (on his left-hand side, and on what, although
raised some way above the street, was the ground floor of
the house) Odette’s bedroom, which looked out to the back
over another little street running parallel with her own, he
had climbed a staircase that went straight up between dark
painted walls, from which hung Oriental draperies, strings
of Turkish beads, and a huge Japanese lantern, suspended
by a silken cord from the ceiling (which last, however, so
that her visitors should not have to complain of the want of
any of the latest comforts of Western civilisation, was light-

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