Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/102

 He dreamed he was drawing a portrait of a woman who sold horrid cigarettes in yellow packets, but no sooner had he sketched in her shoulders than they began to shrug, and, when he protested, the drawing walked right off the page and said to him with humiliating emphasis, "If you can't draw me in French don't draw me at all."

When he awoke he found himself in a world of faded brocade and tarnished gilt. Facing him was a titanic clock that said ten minutes to twelve, and probably had been saying it for a quarter of a century. The clock on his night table said nine-thirty, and his own watch two to four. Not one of us is right, thought Grover, or ever will be.

Between him and the remote ceiling was a stiff canopy that bowed and shook whenever he moved in the bed. Between the windows was a prodigious mirror framed by porcelain cupids, porcelain apples and swallows, porcelain rings and garlands. There was an armoire so big one couldn't imagine how it had got into the room. There was also an inlaid desk with peeling legs, a nicked mantle built over a false fireplace, a dusty bust of Marie Antoinette, sinister gas jets too far away from the bed to read by, and you took your bath, Mme. Choiseul had said, around the corner in the rue des Dames, which made it sound improper.

He kicked off the sheets and lay still, luxuriously cool. Even if all the clocks hadn't stopped, it wouldn't make a particle of difference what time it was; the