CHAPTER IV
It was about nine o'clock the next morning. The heat of the night before had given place to that incomparable freshness which spring mornings have in Paris.
The windows of Mrs. Admaston's sitting-room were open, and a delightfully scented air, from the lilac blossoms and all the flowers of the gardens in the Tuileries, flooded and floated into the room.
Rooms have an aspect of this or that emotion according to the hour in which the events of the soul have taken place within them.
There are some rooms which always have the same mood. When one goes into them one doesn't impose one's mood, one's fancy, or one's ideas upon the place, but is dominated by one lasting personality—of furniture, of aspect, of general mise en scène.
It would be impossible, for example, to have a merry breakfast-party in the hangman's ante-room to the gallows; and one has known rooms in hotels which one enters gladly, unconscious of the pervading gloom which seems to cling to floor and ceiling and rises up like a spectre into the heart and brain after a few minutes' sojourn there.
The sitting-room in the Hôtel des Tuileries, which had been the theatre of such tragic emotions on the last spring midnight, was now ordinary and comfortable enough.
The chairs and settees were all in their proper places. The carpet had been brushed, and its dull blues, greys, and brick-dust reds were all essentially artistic.
And they had brought new flowers there also. The bowls and vases were filled with fresh purple and white lilac. The silver candlesticks had been polished—there were no drippings of wax upon them any more. Tall white candles, fresh, virginal, and unfired, filled all the candlesticks.