The Snow Ball Read Online Free

foibles: after announcing her engagement to her fourth fortune, she had said to Anna ‘My dear, you look at me cynically. I think you think of me as one who has loved not well but too wisely’. All her husbands indulged her ambition towards her purely white room, and if its achievement had been delayed till recently it must be through emotional not economic inhibitions.
    Achieved under the fourth, the room had been made the setting for ornaments—Anna perhaps among them—devoutly collected under earlier régimes. The alpine whiteness was pierced by coloratura moments, flowerings of confectioner’s colour, always unnatural and sometimes anti-natural in heraldic or tropical extravagance. Above the bed, half of an opened Chinese umbrella, struts solidified into brass, silk into iridescent enamel, afforded the occupant or occupants fantasy protection from fantasy weather. A gilt cartouche, German rococo, bursting at all its tips like buds of foliage, finally broke into moistureless waves over a placidly white wall. Two cherubs’ heads—two cherubs’ knobs—conferred tête à tête under a cornice; a flutter of wing beneath them made a conversational gesture as it might be of the hand they were whispering behind. From the mantel as from the sea emerged a porcelain pedestal, white and gold, at once seashell, mollusc’s foot and exotic island, on which a Chelsea shepherd for ever gave tuition on the flute to a Chelsea shepherdess for ever unlearning of both the arts he was trying to teach; she sat without expression, a lamb in her lap and her tutor’s arms about her neck; while behind the whole group an asymetrical blackthorn of inorganic green bloomed in grainy, brain-like white clumps of cauliflower .
    From the room’s shiny surfaces of white, the eye seemed continually slipping off, slipping down, as though your eyelids were being pulled shut and your body being depressed towards floor or bed in a delicious swoon that was half laziness. The whole room tugged, with its own gravitation, against the vertical, drooping and bending under its own heaviness as under an armful of lilacs. Anna, upright in the centre of it all, saw herself, with her head and most of her legschopped off, in her hostess’s looking glass. A middle view of her own vertically, it shewed chiefly her black dress, though it included her pale upper arms, thin as the body of a stick insect, and the bare skeleton of her shoulders and collar bone, harnessed by the dress’s two broad black straps. It made, in the whiteness , a photograph of too high contrast. Only the Siamese kitten on the bed behind mediated between the tones, a small tussock the colour of snow turned slushy in the street.
    Without touching or addressing the kitten, or even properly looking at it, though with an awareness of it as if it had been a temple idol not merely collected but seriously invoked by her friend up here in solitude , Anna walked past the bed and into the little bathroom, where she creamed her face out of Anne’s jar of cold cream, wiped it on Anne’s tissues, dashed it with water from Anne’s basin, which was a modern, fake rococo shell with a single mixer tap, and dried herself in one of Anne’s white towels.
    She came back into the bedroom and opened her small suitcase on the bed, accidentally creating a declivity in the quilted surface into which the kitten tumbled with resentment. She spread her jars and bottles on the dressing table, pushing to one side the tiny snuff box Anne kept there for pins, and seated herself in the white, buttoned tub armchair, pulling it up to the dressing table so that at last her face, and only her face, came into position in the looking glass.
    Very swiftly she rubbed foundation over and intoher face, with hands that were long, ineluctably competent and much too bony, like the hand of death in a gruesome marble tombscape—but with deep pink fingernails.
    She sat back, waiting for the foundation to set, her lids lowered so as not