the curtains aside and peeped into the room. A sight met his eyes
which completely dazzled him. An orange tree, laden with blossoms
and fruit, stood on a long table covered with a Persian rug, and
its shining leaves looked like the leaves of a camellia. There
were rows of cut-crystal glasses filled with all the most beautiful
scented flowers of the whole world, such as jasmine, tuberoses,
violets, lilies of the valley, roses, and lavender. On one end
of the table, half hidden by the orange tree, he saw two delicate
white hands and a pair of slender wrists under turned-up sleeves,
busy with a small distilling apparatus, made of silver. He did not
see the lady's face, and she, too, did not appear to see him. But
when he noticed that her dress was green and yellow, he knew at once
that she was a sorceress, for the caterpillar of the hawk-moth is
green and yellow, and it, too, knows how to bewitch the eye. The
lower end of its body looks as if it were its head and has a horn
like a unicorn, so that it frightens away its enemies with its
mock face, while it feeds in peace with that part of its body which
looks like its hind quarter.

"I know that I'll have a bit of a tussle with her," thought Victor,
"but I'd better let her begin!" He was quite right, because if one
wants to make people talk, one has but to remain silent oneself.

"Are you the gentleman who is looking for a summer resort?" asked
the lady, coming towards him.

"That's me!" said Victor, merely in order to say something, for
he had never thought of looking for a summer resort in the winter
time.