The place was a Babel.
Frenchmen in white paper caps and stained linen blouses were laughing, plying their brushes, mixing paints, shifting ladders, and jabbering all the while at the pitch of their voices.

For a moment the din bewildered her; the ferment had no more meaning, no more method, than a schoolboy's game.

But her eyes, passing over the chaos of paint-pots, brushes, and step-ladders, told her the place had been transformed.
The ceiling between the four pendants had become a blue heaven with filmy clouds, and Cupids scattering roses before a train of doves and a recumbent goddess, whom a little Italian, perched on a scaffolding and whistling shrilly, was varnishing for dear life.

Around the walls-- sky-blue also--trellises of vines and pink roses clambered around the old panels.

The energy of the workmen had passed into their paintings, or perhaps Dorothea's head swam; at any rate, the cupids and doves seemed to be whirling across the ceiling, the vines, and roses mounting towards it, and pushing out shoots and tendrils while they climbed.
But the panels themselves! They were nine in all: three down the long black wall, two narrower ones at the far end, four between the orange- curtained windows looking on the street.