And so, night after night, she would be taken home in Swann's carriage;
and one night, after she had got down, and while he stood at the gate and
murmured "Till to-morrow, then!" she turned impulsively from him, plucked
a last lingering chrysanthemum in the tiny garden which flanked the
pathway from the street to her house, and as he went back to his carriage
thrust it into his hand. He held it pressed to his lips during the drive
home, and when, in due course, the flower withered, locked it away, like
something very precious, in a secret drawer of his desk.
He would escort her to her gate, but no farther. Twice only had he gone
inside to take part in the ceremony--of such vital importance in her life
--of 'afternoon tea.' The loneliness and emptiness of those short streets
(consisting, almost entirely, of low-roofed houses, self-contained but not
detached, their monotony interrupted here and there by the dark intrusion
of some sinister little shop, at once an historical document and a sordid
survival from the days when the district was still one of ill repute), the
snow which had lain on the garden-beds or clung to the branches of the
trees, the careless disarray of the season, the assertion, in this
man-made city, of a state of nature, had all combined to add an element of
mystery to the warmth, the flowers, the luxury which he had found inside.
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