When he had left me in one of the two enormous rooms that were allotted to
me, I threw myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the extraordinary
imaginative impression which this house had given me.

I am very susceptible to such impressions; and besides the sort of spasm of
imaginative interest sometimes given to me by certain rare and eccentric
personalities, I know nothing more subduing than the charm, quieter and
less analytic, of any sort of complete and out-of-the-common-run sort of
house. To sit in a room like the one I was sitting in, with the figures of
the tapestry glimmering grey and lilac and purple in the twilight, the
great bed, columned and curtained, looming in the middle, and the embers
reddening beneath the overhanging mantelpiece of inlaid Italian stonework,
a vague scent of rose-leaves and spices, put into the china bowls by the
hands of ladies long since dead, while the clock downstairs sent up, every
now and then, its faint silvery tune of forgotten days, filled the
room;--to do this is a special kind of voluptuousness, peculiar and complex
and indescribable, like the half-drunkenness of opium or haschisch, and
which, to be conveyed to others in any sense as I feel it, would require a
genius, subtle and heady, like that of Baudelaire.

After I had dressed for dinner I resumed my place in the arm-chair, and
resumed also my reverie, letting all these impressions of the past--which
seemed faded like the figures in the arras, but still warm like the embers
in the fireplace, still sweet and subtle like the perfume of the dead
rose-leaves and broken spices in the china bowls--permeate me and go to my
head. Of Oke and Oke's wife I did not think; I seemed quite alone, isolated
from the world, separated from it in this exotic enjoyment.

Gradually the embers grew paler; the figures in the tapestry more shadowy;
the columned and curtained bed loomed out vaguer; the room seemed to fill