bstantial, like things remembered rather than actually seen.
All that subdued and tender loveliness belonged only to her young
past, and she had been torn from it so violently, it had been flung so
far behind her, that it seemed to her at the moment incredible and
impossible. Life, that had hitherto dealt with her so gently and so
graciously, had in the last two weeks turned hideous and brutal.

She had no very clear idea of how she had got to Cannes. The going was
wiped out. She had been driven through the garden of the Villa des
Palmes and had recognized it as the garden of her dream. She had
passed (through the doors of the Villa) into a state of stupor in
which she had recognized nothing, and thence into a sequence of states
which she could now too well recall. There had been a state of waking,
in which she had found herself in a little gilt and velvet salon.
There was another woman in it, a vast woman in a thin black dress
twinkling all over with little black eyes. She had a great white
powdered face, and they called her Madame. Then followed a state of
hallucination, in which she believed Madame to be an innocent person,
the housekeeper; a state of obsession, in which Madame, as she looked
at her, seemed to grow vaster, to become immense; a state of
imbecility in which her mind feebly tried to grapple with the details
of her father's death as presented brokenly by Madame. Last had come a
state of frenzy, in which she had freed herself from Madame. After
that something had appeared to her in vivid violent illumination.

So vivid and so violent that it seemed to her even now that she was
still sitting in the gilt and velvet salon in the Villa des Palmes;
she still saw the thin green light that came slanting through the
half-closed shutters; warm southern smells floated in, they mixed with
the thick stifling scent of patchouli and orris root wafted from
Madame as she went to and fro, and with some other odour, bitter and
sickly, that came from the room beyond.

She had made out certain familiar objects in this unfamiliar scene.
Her father's travelling rug lay folded on the red velvet sofa; his cap
and gloves were there, just as he had flung them down; his violin,
dumb in its black coffin-like case, stood propped up against the wall.
Everywhere else (only gradually discerned) were things belonging to
Madame, evidence of her supreme and intimate occupation of the room.

And outside was the garden of sharp aloes and