First of all, he saw only a shape, a shape imbued with a faint luminosity si caught and reflected in its yellowed surfaces what little light there was in the ill-lit room; this shape resolved itself into that of, of all things, a hooped-skirted dress of white satin draped here and there with lace, a dress fifty or sixty years out of fashion but once, obviously, intended for a wedding. And then he saw the girl who wore the dress, a girl with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail that her dress seemed to him to hang suspended, as if ued in the dank air, a fabulous lending, a self-articulated garment in which she lived like a ghost in a mae. All the light in the room came from a low-burning lamp with a thick greenish shade on a distant mantelpiece; the e who apanied him shielded her lantern with her hand, as if to protect her mistress from too suddenly seeing, or their guest from too suddenly seeing her.
So that it was little by little, as his eyes grew aced to the half-dark, that he saw how beautiful and how very young the bedizened scarecrow was, ahought of a child dressing up in her mothers clothes, perhaps a child putting on the clothes of a dead mother in order t her, however briefly, to life again.
The tess stood behind a low table, beside a pretty, silly, gilt-and-wire birdcage, hands outstretched in a distracted attitude that was almost one of flight, she looked startled by their entry as if she had not requested it. With her stark white face, her lovely deaths head surrounded by long dark hair that fell down as straight as if it were soaki, she looked like a shipwrecked bride. Her huge dark eyes almost broke his heart with their waiflike, lost look; yet he was disturbed, almost repelled, by her extraordinarily fleshy mouth, a mouth with wide, full, promi lips of a vibrant purplish-crimson, a morbid mouth. Even -- but he put the thought away from him immediately -- a whores mouth. She shivered all the time, a starveling chill, a malarial agitation of the bones. He thought she must be only sixteen or seventeen years old, no more, with the hectihealthy beauty of a ptive. She was the chatelaine of all this decay.
With many tender precautions, the e now raised the light she held to show his hostess her guests face. At that, the tess let out a faint mewing cry and made a blind, appalled gesture with her hands, as if pushing him away, so that she knocked against the table and a butterfly dazzle of painted cards fell to the floor. Her mouth formed a round "o" of woe, she swayed a little and then sank into her chair, where she lay as if now scarcely capable of moving. A bewilderiion. Tsking under her breath, the e busily poked about oable until she found an enormous pair of dark green glasses, such as blind beggars wear, and perched them on the tesss nose.
He went forward to pick up her cards for her from a carpet that, he saw to his surprise, art rotted aartly encroached upon by all kinds of virulent-looking fungi. He retrieved the cards and shuffled them carelessly together, for they meant nothing to him, though they seemed strange playthings for a young girl. What a grisly picture of a capering skeleton! He covered it up with a happier one -- of two young lovers, smiling at one another, and put her toys bato a hand so slender you could almost see the frail of bones beh the translut skin, a hand with fingernails as long, as finely pointed, as banjo picks.
At his touch, she seemed to