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2em

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of the laburnum, that were hanging from the tremulous branches that 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 sketched 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