There
were numerous windows with small panes, and one divined the hall
beyond the porch. The hall delighted us, and I said to Doris as we
passed through that the hotel must have been a nobleman's house some
long while ago, when Orelay had a society of its own, perhaps a
language, for in the seventeenth or the eighteenth century Provencal
or some other dialect must have been written or spoken at Orelay. We
admired the galleries overlooking the hall, and the staircase leading
to them. We seemed to have been transported into the eighteenth
century; the atmosphere was that of a Boucher, a provincial Boucher
perhaps, but an eighteenth-century artist for all that. The doves that
crowd round Aphrodite seemed to have led us right; and we foresaw a
large quiet bedroom with an Aubusson carpet in the middle of a parquet
floor, writing-tables in the corners of the room or in the
silken-curtained windows.
This was the kind of room I had imagined--one as large as a
drawing-room, and furnished like a drawing-room, with sofas and
arm-chairs that we could draw around the fire, and myself and Doris
sitting there talking. Love is composed in a large measure of desire
of intimacy, and if the affection that birds experience in making
their nest be not imitated, love descends to the base satisfaction of
animals which merely meet in obedience to an instinct, and separate as
soon as the instinct has been served.
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