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Ronder accepted this as an invitation and came in. "You'd better come into the other room," said Foster, looking about him as though he had been just ruthlessly awakened from an important dream. They passed through a little passage and an untidy sitting-room into the study. This was a place piled high with books and its only furniture was a deal table and two straw-bottomed chairs.
The yellow-curtained bed, the walnut chest of drawers, and the three straw-bottomed chairs seemed lost below that lofty ceiling with whitewashed joists. A faint tartness, the somewhat musty odour of old country houses, ascended from the tiled and ruddled floor that glistened like a mirror.
He was the sort of man to whom you can't explain anything. He was extremely sensitive, and it would have been a tigerish thing to do to mangle his delicate feelings by the sort of plain speaking that would have been necessary. His mind was like a white-walled, pure chamber, furnished with, say, six straw-bottomed chairs, and he was always placing and displacing them in various combinations.
After a few moments the prisoner began to distinguish objects confusedly, and this is what he found: White-washed walls here and there turned green by various exhalations; in one corner a round hole guarded by iron bars, and exhaling a disgusting smell; in another corner a slab turning upon a hinge like the bracket seat of a fiacre, and thus capable of being used as a table; no bed; a straw-bottomed chair; under foot a brick floor.
The walls were painted a hideous drab. The stone floor was covered with small, hard, straw-bottomed chairs and narrow wooden forms for the patient knees of worshippers. In the front were two rows of private chairs, with velvet cushions of various brilliant hues and velvet-covered rails. On the left was a high stone pulpit. The altar, beyond its mean black and gold railing, was dingy and forlorn.
In the centre of that one room where the family slept and ate, Euphrasie sat on a straw-bottomed chair; and although she was barely thirty years of age, one might have taken her for a little old woman of fifty; so thin and so withered did she look that she resembled one of those fruits, suddenly deprived of sap, that dry up on the tree.
Finally, anything on which the female had rested communicated its virtues by contact; witness the butterflies crowding on the straw-bottomed chair after the twig fell to the ground. Using one of the most favourable materials flannel, for example I witnessed a curious sight.
'Yes, thank you. 'Headache gone? 'Nearly, with a heavy sigh. Felix drew an ancient straw-bottomed chair in front of the fire backwards, placed himself astride on it, laid his arms on the top and his forehead on them, and in this imposing Mentorial attitude began, 'After all, Clem, I don't see that you need be so desperately broken- hearted. It was mere innocence and ignorance.
There stood yet the two well-scoured old deal-tables, wrinkled, though, from the protruding fibres of the wood; there were the straw-bottomed stools still; and at the window, Mother Martha's arm-chair, before which, as a child, he had repeated his lessons; there still hung the same little glass between the windows; and the wall-clock above the stove sent forth its tic-tac as fastly as ever.
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