To confuse the eye still more, a quantity of young India-rubber trees,
with glossy leaves, were placed before the large central mirror. The
carpet was a warm velvet-pile, the walls were distempered, a French
gray, not cold, but with a tint of mauve that gave a warm and cheering
bloom; this soothing color gave great effect to the one or two
masterpieces of painting that hung on the walls and to the gilt frames;
the furniture, oak and marqueterie highly polished; the curtains,
scarlet merino, through which the sun shone, and, being a London sun,
diffused a mild rosy tint favorable to female faces. Not a sound of
London could be heard.
So far the room was romantic; but there was a prosaic corner to shock
those who fancy that fiction is the spontaneous overflow of a poetic
fountain fed by nature only; between the fireplace and the window, and
within a foot or two of the wall, stood a gigantic writing-table, with
the signs of hard labor on it, and of severe system. Three plated
buckets, each containing three pints, full of letters to be answered,
other letters to be pasted into a classified guard-book, loose notes to
be pasted into various books and classified (for this writer used to
sneer at the learned men who say, "I will look among my papers for it;"
he held that every written scrap ought either to be burned, or pasted
into a classified guard-book, where it could be found by consulting the
index); five things like bankers' bill-books, into whose several
compartments MS.
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