Here before our eyes was
an unspoiled sample of what the world must have looked like on
varnishing day.
Swank, who is ultra-modern in his tendencies, was in ecstasies over
the naive simplicity of the color scheme. "Look at that red!" he
shouted. "Look at that blue!! Look at that yaller!!!" He dove below
and I heard rattling of tubes and brushes that told me he was about
to commit landscape. This time I knew he couldn't possibly make the
colors too violent.
Fringing the exquisitely tinted coral strand were outlying reefs,
alternately concave and convex, which gave the shore edge a scalloped,
almost rococo finish, which I have heard decorators call the
Chinese-Chippendale "effect." Borne to our nostrils by an occasional
reflex of the zooming trades came, ever and anon, entrancing whiffs
of a brand new odor.
It is always embarrassing to attempt to describe a new smell, for,
such is our inexperience in the nasal field, that a new smell must
invariably be described in terms of _other_ smells, and by reason of a
curious, inherited prudery this province has been left severely alone by
English writers.
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