It was a big, dove-gray room with a darkly oiled floor of old, wide boards. Four dormer windows reached from the floor to the raised roof at one side, and two smaller and higher windows faced the west. On the baby grand piano near the door Ariel noticed a shallow bowl with hothouse anemones standing up in it, every flower separate, outlined on the air with glass-like precision,—mauve, pink, purple, blue, cream. A low daybed of ivory-colored wood carved all over with flower designs was drawn up before one of the dormer windows, heaped with violet-red and silver cushions. Close to the bed, within easy arm’s reach, there was a bench of the same carved ivory-white wood, with a few books scattered on it, a crystal lamp with a wide, pale gold shade, and a glass bowl of hothouse violets. Several bouquets of violets like the one Hugh had intended for Ariel but given to Joan must have gone into this bunch in the glass bowl. Their sweetness was almost palpable. Scent came falling through the air onto Ariel’s eyelids and onto her lips, as if the very petals of the violets themselves were wings and filling space. After the anemones and the violets the wood fire blazing away in a small grate was next alive, throwing rosy shadows over black marble tiling, and flickering them up onto tiers of books whose backs gave the effect of rich tapestry hung from ceiling to floor on either side of the fireplace. The fire seemed to Ariel like another cluster of flowers. “Roses!” she thought. Then she closed the door,—and in closing it shut herself into the room. For it had not entered her head to go away and leave this place until its mistress should return. She was already welcomed by the flowers, the fire, and the aura of Grandam herself, which even in her absence seemed as palpable in the atmosphere here as the scent of the violets. Ariel stood looking at the door she had closed. On this side it was not a door; it was a long mirror, crystal clear, and framed with a paneling of faintly colored flowers and leaves painted on silver. In the mirror, almost clearer than when looked at directly, was the view from the windows, the tops of Wild Acres’ trees, the Hudson, the purple Palisades, and closer—startlingly close and clear—the carved daybed with its colored cushions, the bowl of violets and, closer and clearer yet, two upstanding, mauve anemones.... And there, in that reflected world, Ariel looked for “Noon.” For there was the place to find it, in that crystal unearthly clearness.