Everything encouraged him to live. The sun was tracing his majestic course; it was like Sicily. And he had got rid of a worrying piece of business.
Suddenly a cloud passed over the sun. The feeling of well-being left him. All at once Lewis felt he was seeing things as they really were. His destiny seemed to unfold itself before him.
"How cold it is now that she is gone," he thought, "how bored I am!"
Irene had revealed a great truth to him. He knew that the next time he saw her he would ask her to marry him.
[XI]
THE next evening Lewis dined with the Apostolatoses in Bayswater.
A Gothic hall with elephant tusks and Italian cabinets made of ebony, from which the inlaid ivory bulged, loosened by the hot air from the heating apparatus; for the house was centrally heated: England was already far away.
In the drawing-room upholstered in cherry-coloured damask, on a uniform ground of crimson velvet, stood out black Khorasan enamels, minute Giordès designs and delicate Sineh whorls. The drawing-room formed a kind of atrium surrounded by a balcony of polished wood from which hung Janina embroideries, Scutari velvets and huge mosque lamps decorated with cyphers in relief. Between the windows stood an Arab saddle in violet leather braided with gold, hung with all the weapons of an emir.
Other embroideries similar to those on the walls were displayed in glass cases, but these got older and older and became finer and finer, more difficult to see and more tiring to the eyes, going back to the period of Byzantine lace.
When Lewis arrived, the company, as they say in Russian novels, consisted of Irene and three other ladies, two of whom rose to their feet. These were the old cousins of Irene, the Misses Apostolatos. They stood one on each side of their paralytic old grandmother, a kind of moody Napoléon, who, seated on a throne, followed the conversation with a vacant face but an alert eye from which her thoughts seemed to trickle. Beside her on the table was a half-finished game of patience.