It was of fine lace woven in a single piece, and it lay in a foam of shining threads traced with pure lines of shadow.

On her head were a jeweled coronal and jeweled hair-loops in the Phoenician fashion, once taken from a king's casket and sent secretly, upon the decline of Assyrian ascendancy, to be bartered in the marts of Coele-Syria.

Chains of jewels, in a noon of colour, lay about her throat, as once they lay upon the shoulders of the dead queens of Yaque and, before them, of the women of the elder dynasties long since recorded in indifferent dust.

Girdling her waist was a zone of rubies that burned positive in the tempered light.

With all her delicacy, Olivia was like her rubies--vivid, graphic, delineated not by light but by line.
The members of the High Council rustled in their colour and white, and flashed their golden stars; the Golden Guards (save the apostate few who were that day sentenced to be set adrift) were filling the stairway like a bank of buttercups; and Olivia's women, led by Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated, were entering by an opposite door.