oom.

He had been obliged on the former visit to conceal astonishment; but now
he found himself alone, and no concealment was needed. And the former
astonishment was slight compared with this one. He felt almost giddy as
he gazed about him. Nothing was the same. Everything was fantastically,
incredibly different, except--his eye caught it with a sharpened pang of
wonder--the white pagoda; for there, in the centre of the room, upon a
round, mahogany table, with heavily bowed and richly carven legs, the
white pagoda stood, and under it an old bead mat,--a mat of faded, old
blue beads,--his eyes were riveted on the pagoda and its setting,--of
white and gray and blue beads dotted with pink rosebuds. At regular
intervals, raying out from the centre, books were placed upon the
table--small, sober books bound in calf.

So the pagoda stood, the pivot of an incredible room; yet, inconceivable
as it seemed, as right there, all its exquisite absurdity revealed, as
it had been right in the other. It was the one link that joined them,
the one thread in the labyrinth of his astonishment; and it seemed, with
its ambiguous, fantastic smile, to symbolize its absent owner. Was it an
exquisite, extravagant, elaborate joke that she and the pagoda were
having together?

For the whole room was now a joke. It was furnished with a suite of
black satin--sofas, easy-chairs, little chairs with carved, excruciating
backs, all densely buttoned and richly fringed. Over the backs of the
easy-chairs were laid antimacassars of finely crocheted white lace. Upon
two tall pieces of mahogany, ranged up and down with knobbed drawers and
recalling in their decorous solidity the buttoned bodices of
mid-Victorian matrons, stood high-handled, white marble urns. An oval
gilt mirror hung above the mantelpiece, and upon it stood two lustres
ringed with prisms of glass and a little clock of gilt and marble,
ornamented with two marble doves hovering over a gilt nest wherein lay
marble eggs. Between the clock and the lustres, on either side, was a
vase of Bohemian glass, each holding a small nosegay of red and white
roses. Mahogany footstools with bead-worked tops stood before the fire,
and upon the walls hung, exquisite in their absurdity, like the pagoda,
a whole botanical series of flat, feeble old flower-pieces, neatly
coloured drawings, as accurate and as lifeless as vigilant, uninspired
labour could make them.

No, it was a dream, an insane, delightful drea