“Hallo! Any one there?”
There was no answer. “I’d better go into the back parlour,” he thought, “and do my shopping there.” He took a little run, put his right hand on the counter and cleared it at a bound. Then he pushed 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.
The lady seemed embarrassed, but she was as beautiful as sin, and cast a bewitching glance at the pilot.
“It’s no use trying to bewitch me, for I am engaged to a very nice girl,” he said, staring between her second and third finger in the manner of a witch, when she wants to charm the judge.
The lady was young and beautiful from the waist upwards, but below the waist she seemed very old; it was just as if she had been patched together of two pieces which didn’t match.
“Well, show me the summer resort,” said the pilot.
“If you please, sir,” replied the lady, opening a door in the background.