The light were low and shaded, and a great
couch filled one side of the room beyond the fireplace. Such a couch!
covered with a tiger-skin and piled with pillows, all shades of rich
purple velvet and silk, embroidered with silver and gold--unlike any
pillows he had ever seen before, even to their shapes. The whole thing
was different and strange--and intoxicating.
The lady had reached the couch, and sank into it. She was in black
still, but gauzy, clinging black, which seemed to give some gleam of
purple underneath. And if he had not been sure that in daylight he had
thought they were green, he would have sworn the eyes which now looked
into his were deepest violet, too.
"Come," she said. "You may sit here beside me and tell me what you
think."
And her voice was like rich music--but she had hardly any accent. She
might have been an Englishwoman almost, for that matter, and yet he
somehow knew that she was not. Perhaps it was she pronounced each
word; nothing was slurred over. Without her hat she looked even more
attractive, and certainly younger. But what was age or youth? And what
was beauty itself, when a woman whose face was neither young nor
beautiful could make him feel he was looking at a divine goddess, and
thrilling as he had never dreamt of doing in his short life?
If any one had told Paul this was going to happen to him, this
experience, he would have laughed them to scorn.
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