A good fire glowed in a little range where nightclothes were warming on the brass fender. I felt a sudden, sharp pang of disappoio firail lead me to the nursery; I had been duped of all the fleshly advehe house had promised me and that, damn them, must be part of the joke, too. All the same, if I indulged the fancy of the child Id seen in the mirror, perhaps I might ehe fancy of her mother, who must be still young enough to enjoy the caress of a bearskiead; and not, Id be bound, inimical to poetry, either.
This mother, who had ned even the o whiteness, white walls, white painted furniture, white rug, white curtains, all chic as hell. Even the child had been made a slave to fashiohough the nursery itself had succumbed to the interior designers snowdrift that had engulfed the entire house, its inhabitants had not. Id never seen so many dolls before, not even in Melissas et, and all quite exquisite, as if theyd just e from the shop, although some of them must be older than I was. How Melissa would have loved them!
Dolls sat on shelves with their legs stuck out before them, dolls spilled from toychests. Fine ladies in taffeta bustles and French hats, babies in every gradation of ess. A limp-limbed, golden-haired creature in pink satin sprawled as if in sensual abandon on the rug in front of the fire. A wonderfully elaborate lady in a kitsch Victorian pelisse of maroon silk, with brown hair under a feather straw bo, lay in an armchair by the fire with as proprietorial an air as if the room beloo her. A delicious lass in a purple velvet riding habit occupied the saddle of the wonderful albino rog horse.
Now at last I was surrounded by beautiful women and they were dumb repositories of all the lively colours that had been exiled from the place, vivid as a hot-house, but none of them existed, all were mute, were fis and that multitude of glass eyes, like tears gealed in time, made me feel very lonely.
Outside, the snow flurried against the windows; the storm had begun in ear. Ihere was still ohreshold left to cross. I guessed she would be there, waiting for me, whoever she was, although I hesitated, if only momentarily, before the door that lead to the night nursery, as if unseen gryphons might guard it.
Faint glow of a night light on the mantelpiece; a dim tranquillity, here, where the air is full of the warm, pale smells of childhood, of hair, of soap, of talcum powder, the inses of her sanctuary. And the moment I ehe night nursery, I could hear her transparent breathing; she had hardly hidden herself at all, not even pulled the covers of her white-enamelled crib around her. I had taken the game seriously but she, its instigator, had not; she had fallen fast asleep in the middle of it, her eyelids buttoned down, her long, blonde, patri hair streaming over the pillow.
She wore a white, fragile, lace smod her long, white stogs were fine as the smoky breath of a winters m. She had kicked off her white kid sandals. This little huhis little quarry, lay curled up with her thumb wedged, baby-like, in her mouth.
The wind yowled in the ey and snow pelted the window. The curtains were not yet drawn so I closed them for her and at ohe room deempest, so I could have thought I had been snug all my life. Weariness came over me; I sank down in the basketwork chair by her bed. I was loath to leave the pany of the only living thing Id found in the mansion and even if Nanny brusquely stormed in to interrogate me,