Couches With Grass-Woven
Covers Invited Everywhere, And There Was A Grand Piano, That Played,
I Was Sure, Nothing More Exciting Than Lullabies.
Servants -
Japanese maids in native costume - drifted around and about,
noiselessly, like butterflies.
Everything was preternaturally cool.
Here was no blazing down of a tropic sun upon an unshrinking sea.
It was too good to be true. But it was not real. It was a dream-
dwelling. I knew, for I turned suddenly and caught the grand piano
cavorting in a spacious corner of the room. I did not say anything,
for just then we were being received by a gracious woman, a
beautiful Madonna, clad in flowing white and shod with sandals, who
greeted us as though she had known us always.
We sat at table on the lotus-eating veranda, served by the butterfly
maids, and ate strange foods and partook of a nectar called poi.
But the dream threatened to dissolve. It shimmered and trembled
like an iridescent bubble about to break. I was just glancing out
at the green grass and stately trees and blossoms of hibiscus, when
suddenly I felt the table move. The table, and the Madonna across
from me, and the veranda of the lotus-eaters, the scarlet hibiscus,
the greensward and the trees - all lifted and tilted before my eyes,
and heaved and sank down into the trough of a monstrous sea. I
gripped my chair convulsively and held on. I had a feeling that I
was holding on to the dream as well as the chair.
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