Everything was as she had always seen it, from the ugly Satsuma vases flanking the ugly bronze clock on the mantelpiece, to the sheaf of pink roses lying beside her in their white paper wrappings.

Even Miss Harriet Robinson's choice of welcoming flowers was the same.

So it had always been, and so, no doubt, it would continue to be for many years to come; and she, no doubt, for many summers, would arrive from Basle to sit, jadedly, looking at it.
Amelie, her maid, was unpacking in the next room; the door was ajar, and Miss Jakes could hear the creaking of lifted trays and the rustling of multitudinous tissue-paper layers.

The sounds suggested an answer to a dim question that had begun to hover in her travel-worn mind.

One came back every summer to the Hotel Talleyrand for the purpose of getting clothes; that, perhaps, was a sufficient answer.