After waiting a minute, I would go in and kiss her; Francoise would be
making her tea; or, if my aunt were feeling 'upset,' she would ask instead
for her 'tisane,' and it would be my duty to shake out of the chemist's
little package on to a plate the amount of lime-blossom required for
infusion in boiling water. The drying of the stems had twisted them into a
fantastic trellis, in whose intervals the pale flowers opened, as though a
painter had arranged them there, grouping them in the most decorative
poses. The leaves, which had lost or altered their own appearance, assumed
those instead of the most incongruous things imaginable, as though the
transparent wings of flies or the blank sides of labels or the petals of
roses had been collected and pounded, or interwoven as birds weave the
material for their nests. A thousand trifling little details--the charming
prodigality of the chemist--details which would have been eliminated from
an artificial preparation, gave me, like a book in which one is astonished
to read the name of a person whom one knows, the pleasure of finding that
these were indeed real lime-blossoms, like those I had seen, when coming
from the train, in the Avenue de la Gare, altered, but only because they
were not imitations but the very same blossoms, which had grown old.
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