It is true that, when morning drew near, I would long have settled the
brief uncertainty of my waking dream, I would know in what room I was
actually lying, would have reconstructed it round about me in the
darkness, and--fixing my orientation by memory alone, or with the
assistance of a feeble glimmer of light at the foot of which I placed the
curtains and the window--would have reconstructed it complete and with its
furniture, as an architect and an upholsterer might do, working upon an
original, discarded plan of the doors and windows; would have replaced the
mirrors and set the chest-of-drawers on its accustomed site. 'But scarcely
had daylight itself--and no longer the gleam from a last, dying ember on a
brass curtain-rod, which I had mistaken for daylight--traced across the
darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across a blackboard, its first white
correcting ray, when the window, with its curtains, would leave the frame
of the doorway, in which I had erroneously placed it, while, to make room
for it, the writing-table, which my memory had clumsily fixed where the
window ought to be, would hurry off at full speed, thrusting before it the
mantelpiece, and sweeping aside the wall of the passage; the well of the
courtyard would be enthroned on the spot where, a moment earlier, my
dressing-room had lain, and the dwelling-place which I had built up for
myself in the darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings
of which I had caught glimpses from the whirlpool of awakening; put to
flight by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted
forefinger of day.
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