From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on
which he was lying, smoking, as usual, innumerable
cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam
of the honey-sweet and honey-colored blossoms of the
laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able
to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and
now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted
across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in
front of the huge window, producing a kind of
momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those
pallid jade-faced painters who, in an art that is necessarily
immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and
motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their
way through the long unmown grass, or circling with
monotonous insistence round the black-crocketed spires of
the early June hollyhocks, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive, and the dim roar of London was like the
bourdon note of a distant organ.