XIV. The Yellow Flower
The girl sat in a great chair before the fire, huddled, staring into the glow of the smoldering logs.
Her dark hair clouded her face. The evening gown was twisted and crumpled about her. There was no ornament on her; her arms, her shoulders, the exquisite column of her throat were bare.
She sat with her eyes wide, unmoving, in a profound reflection.
The library was softly lighted; richly furnished, a little beyond the permission of good taste. On a table at the girl's elbow were two objects; a ruby necklace, and a dried flower. The flower, fragile with age, seemed a sort of scrub poppy of a delicate yellow; the flower of some dwarfed bush, prickly like a cactus.
The necklace made a great heap of jewels on the buhl top of the table, above the intricate arabesque of silver and tortoise-shell.
It was nearly midnight. Outside, the dull rumble of London seemed a sound, continuous, unvarying, as though it were the distant roar of a world turning in some stellar space.
It was a great old house in Park Lane, heavy and of that gloomy architecture with which the feeling of the English people, at an earlier time, had been so strangely in accord. It stood before St. James's Park oppressive and monumental, and now in the midst of yellow fog its heavy front was like a mausoleum.
But within, the house had been treated to a modern re-casting, not entirely independent of the vanity of wealth.