d when, in due course, the flower withered, locked it
away, like something very precious, in a secret drawer of his desk.

He would escort her to her gate, but no farther. Twice only had he gone
inside to take part in the ceremony--of such vital importance in her
life--of 'afternoon tea.' The loneliness and emptiness of those
short streets (consisting, almost entirely, of low-roofed houses,
self-contained but not detached, their monotony interrupted here and
there by the dark intrusion of some sinister little shop, at once
an historical document and a sordid survival from the days when the
district was still one of ill repute), the snow which had lain on the
garden-beds or clung to the branches of the trees, the careless disarray
of the season, the assertion, in this man-made city, of a state of
nature, had all combined to add an element of mystery to the warmth, the
flowers, the luxury which he had found inside.

Passing by (on his left-hand side, and on what, although raised some way
above the street, was the ground floor of the house) Odette's bedroom,
which looked out to the back over another little street running parallel
with her own, he had climbed a staircase that went straight up between
dark painted walls, from which hung Oriental draperies, strings of
Turkish beads, and a huge Japanese lantern, suspended by a silken cord
from the ceiling (which last, however, so that her visitors should not
have to complain of the want of any of the latest comforts of
Western civilisation, was lighted by a gas-jet inside), to the two
drawing-rooms, large and small. These were entered through a narrow
lobby, the wall of which, chequered with the lozenges of a wooden
trellis such as you see on garden walls, only gilded, was lined from
end to end by a long rectangular box in which bloomed, as though in a
hothouse, a row of large chrysanthemums, at that time still
uncommon, though by no means so large as the mammoth blossoms which
horticulturists have since succeeded in making grow. Swann was
irritated, as a rule, by the sight of these flowers, which had then been
'the rage' in Paris for about a year, but it had pleased him, on this
occasion, to see the gloom of the little lobby shot with rays of pink
and gold and white by the fragrant petals of these ephemeral stars,
which kindle their cold fires in the murky atmosphere of winter
afternoons. Odette had received him in a tea-gown of pink silk, which
left her neck and arms bare.