A broken statue of a pastoral shepherd had been laid on a table in the corner and partly covered with a cloth, where it looked very much like a corpse awaiting its turn in a dissecting-room.
Charles had a dreary wait in these surroundings.

At first he sat still, but as the time passed he endeavoured to distract his anxious thoughts by walking round the room looking at the extraordinary collections of objects it contained.

He was earnestly scrutinizing a lutestring picture depicting "The Origin of the Dimple"-- a cupid poking his forefinger into the double chin of a fat languishing female--when the door opened and a woman entered.
She was tall and thin, and had reached that period of life when it costs a woman an effort to look in a mirror because of the menace of approaching age which stares back from the depth of frightened eyes.

Her dress, however, suggested that she could not bring herself to believe she was yet out of the hunt, but was still trying to follow it breathlessly on the back of that broken-kneed and sorry steed, late middle-age.

There was something ridiculous in the girlish attire intended to convince her fellow creatures that her day was not over; something terrible in the low blouse, short skirt, silk stockings, gauze, lace and fluttering ribbons with which she sought to delude the sneering figure of waiting Time.
Charles's first startled thought was that he had unwittingly entered one of those neglected shuttered houses of romance, where an eccentric female recluse sits with a waiting wedding breakfast in readiness for a bridegroom who has disappeared thirty years before.