There were besides mirrors on
the other three walls of the room, all hung with such careful intent
for the exercise of their vocation that the apartment, in spots,
extended indefinitely; the brilliant chandelier was thereby
quadrupled, and the furniture and ornaments multiplied everywhere
and most unexpectedly into twins and triplets, producing such
sociabilities among them, and forcing such correspondences between
inanimate objects with such hospitable insistence, that the effect was
full of gaiety and life, although the interchange in reality was the
mere repetition of one original, a kind of phonographic echo.
The portrait of monsieur, madame's handsome young husband, hung out
of the circle of radiance, in the isolation that, wherever they hang,
always seems to surround the portraits of the dead.
Old as the parlors appeared, madame antedated them by the sixteen
years she had lived before her marriage, which had been the occasion
of their furnishment. She had traveled a considerable distance over
the sands of time since the epoch commemorated by the portrait.
Indeed, it would require almost documentary evidence to prove that
she, who now was arriving at eighty, was the same Atalanta that had
started out so buoyantly at sixteen.
Instead of a cap, she wore black lace over her head, pinned with gold
brooches. Her white hair curled naturally over a low forehead.
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