Page:Othmar, by Ouida.djvu/12

4 She, herself, was seated on an ivory chair, carved with Hindoo steel, and shaped like a curule chair of old Rome. Two little pages, in costumes of the Valois time, stood behind her, holding large fans of peacock's plumes.

'They are anachronisms,' she had said with a passing frown at the fans, 'but they may remain, though quite certainly the Valois did not know anything of them any more than they knew of blue china and yellow tea.'

But the gorgeous green and gold and purple-eyed plumes looked pretty, so she had let them stay.

'We shall have so many jarring notes of "modernity" in our discussions,' she had said, 'that one note the more in decoration does not matter;' and, backed by them, she sat now upon her ivory throne, an exquisite figure, poetic and delicate, with her cream-white skirts of the same hue as her throne, and her strings of great pearls at her throat. Next her was seated an ecclesiastic of high eminence, who had in vain protested that he was wholly out of place in such a diversion. 'Was Cardinal Bembo out of place at Ferrara and Urbino?' she had objected; and had so