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There were vistas of drawing-rooms, with delicious boudoirs, like side chapels in a temple of Venus, with handsome Charlie Ferrola gliding in and out, or lecturing dreamily from the corner of some sofa on the last most important crinkle of the artistic rose-leaf, demonstrating conclusively that beauty was the only true morality, and that there was no sin but bad taste; and that nobody knew what good taste was but himself and his clique.
Vice is like an Autocrat, and let a single harsh fold in a rose-leaf irritate it, it forgets a thousand charming bygone flatteries. With Vice a man's course must always be crescendo! and forever. Axiom. Vice, Courtiers, Misfortune and Love, care only for the PRESENT.
Michael was drifting towards the wide balcony, towards the fresh cool air of the river. "No," Meg said determinedly, "not there." A vision of Mrs. Mervill, pink and fair and seductive, had risen before her, the rose-leaf creature with the hard eyes, who had so abruptly broken her sympathy with Michael. Michael, without speaking, quickly turned the other way.
That was supposed to be woman's domain, where she was the sovereign power; there she was helper, sustainer, director, the dear dispenser of favors. The woman's kingdom, queen of the home. Gradually the words led her down long lanes of retrospect, led by the rose-leaf touch of the baby's fingers; they kept her strong. What kingdom had she ever made her own?
I have been thinking over the pleasant evening of yesterday, an experience in which the sweets of friendship, the charm of mutual understanding, aesthetic pleasure, and a general sense of comfort, were happily combined and intermingled. There was not a crease in the rose-leaf. Why?
His nerves must be steady for him to finish a rose-leaf or the fold of a nymph's drapery in his best manner; and they will be unsteadied if he has to perform the honest drudgery which another can do for him quite as well.
Among the pedlers all sorts of vegetables were for sale, and the groper-fish, shark-fin soup, meats minced with herbs and onions, poultry cut up and sold in pieces, stewed goose, bird's-nest soup, rose-leaf soup with garlic heaven with the other place, Scott called it and scores of other eatables for native palates, and some of them would suit the taste of Americans.
The first syllable was always more than she could manage, and she made funny little gestures with her rose-leaf hands, as one throwing the name away, and then, kneeling before Trejago, asked him, exactly as an Englishwoman would do, if he were sure he loved her. Trejago swore that he loved her more than any one else in the world. Which was true.
In the historical nights of which Perrault told, the princess had but a gesture to make, the offender sank dead. At once a bier was produced, the corpse was hurried away, and the veils of charm restored fell languorously. Yet, in that historical epoch, there subsisted perhaps as a reminder of the vanities even of fairyland the rose-leaf suggestively crumpled.
Doubtless the crumpled rose-leaf is there, as it is everywhere, but unless it is there to lend a faint old-fashioned odor as of pot-pourri to life in those apartments, I do not believe that it abounds in any of them.
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