'Why not?' asked Helene, when he was gone. 'We can sit on cushions.' 'Why not?' echoed the Pasha. Grateful as he was for the interruption, he found himself wishing, secretly, that Helene had discouraged his idea of a picnic dinner. And he could not help feeling a certain constraint as he gave the necessary orders and watched the servants put down their paraphernalia and pull the chest into the middle of the room. There was something unreal and stage-like about the scene, in the uncertain light of the lantern. Obviously the chest was not light. It was an old cypress-wood chest that they had always used in the summer, to keep furs in, polished a bright brown, with a little inlaid pattern of dark brown and cream color running around the edge of each surface, and a more complicated design ornamenting the centre of the cover. He vaguely associated his mother with it. He felt a distinct relief when the men spread the cloth. He felt as if they had covered up more things than he could name. And when they produced candlesticks and candles, and set them on the improvised table and in the niches beside the door, he seemed to come back again into the comfortable light of common sense. 'This is the way we used to do when I was a boy,' he said with a smile, when he and Helene established themselves on sofa cushions on opposite sides of the chest. 'Only then we had little tables six inches high, instead of big ones like this.' 'It is rather a pity that we have spoiled all that,' she said. 'Are we any happier for perching on chairs around great scaffoldings and piling the scaffoldings with so many kinds of porcelain and metal? After all, they knew how to live--the people who were capable of imagining a place like this. And they had the good taste not to fill a room with things. Your grandfather, was it?' He had had a dread that she would not say anything, that she would remain silent and impenetrable, as she had been before Zuembuel Agha, as if the chest between them were a barrier that nothing could surmount. His heart lightened when he heard her speak. Was it not quite her natural voice? 'It was my great-grandfather, the Grand Vizier. They say he did know how to live--in his way. He built the kiosque for a beautiful slave of his, a Greek, whom he called Pomegranate.'