Page 341 - swanns-way

when her footman began to come into the room, bringing,
one after another, the innumerable lamps which (contained,
mostly, in porcelain vases) burned singly or in pairs upon
the different pieces of furniture as upon so many altars, re-
kindling in the twilight, already almost nocturnal, of this
winter afternoon, the glow of a sunset more lasting, more
roseate, more human—filling, perhaps, with romantic won-
der the thoughts of some solitary lover, wandering in the
street below and brought to a standstill before the mys-
tery of the human presence which those lighted windows
at once revealed and screened from sight—she had kept an
eye sharply fixed on the servant, to see whether he set each
of the lamps down in the place appointed it. She felt that, if
he were to put even one of them where it ought not to be, the
general effect of her drawing-room would be destroyed, and
that her portrait, which rested upon a sloping easel draped
with plush, would not catch the light. And so, with fever-
ish impatience, she followed the man’s clumsy movements,
scolding him severely when he passed too close to a pair of
beaupots, which she made a point of always tidying herself,
in case the plants should be knocked over—and went across
to them now to make sure that he had not broken off any
of the flowers. She found something ‘quaint’ in the shape
of each of her Chinese ornaments, and also in her orchids,
the cattleyas especially (these being, with chrysanthemums,
her favourite flowers), because they had the supreme merit
of not looking in the least like other flowers, but of being
made, apparently, out of scraps of silk or satin. ‘It looks just
as though it had been cut out of the lining of my cloak,’ she

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