Dulcie turned to the dresser to get her handkerchief; and then she stopped still, and bit her underlip hard.
At half-past nine Dulcie took a last look at the pictures on the dresser, turned out the light, and skipped into bed.
Lucinda sat upon the upset kitchen stove and stared, and Jane leaned against the kitchen
dresser and smiled; but neither of them made any remark.
Philip flushed, all the more because the surgeon spoke obviously with a humorous intention, and his brow-beaten
dressers laughed obsequiously.
Con- trasting vividly with this ruin was the neat
dresser, stained in the fashion, pale green, and with a number of copper and tin vessels below it, the wallpaper imitating blue and white tiles, and a couple of coloured supplements fluttering from the walls above the kitchen range.
The cold sunlight of this spring evening peered invidiously upon the crocks and kettles, upon the bunches of dried herbs shivering in the breeze, upon the brass handles of the
dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all been rocked in, and upon the well-rubbed clock-case, all of which gave out the reproachful gleam of indoor articles abandoned to the vicissitudes of a roofless exposure for which they were never made.
"Well?" cried Arnold, jumping off the
dresser, "is the coast clear?"
The door was opened to them by an aged servant or "dresser", whose broken-down face and figure and black shabby coat and trousers contrasted queerly with the glittering interior of the great actress's dressing-room.
They both spoke to the dingy dresser by name, calling him Parkinson, and asking for the lady as Miss Aurora Rome.
There was no furniture, save a single long
dresser covered with coarse crockery, and a number of wooden benches and trestles, the legs of which sank deeply into the soft clay floor, while the only light, save that of the fire, was furnished by three torches stuck in sockets on the wall, which flickered and crackled, giving forth a strong resinous odor.
But the room seemed a palace to the brats of the corps de ballet, who were lodged in common dressing-rooms where they spent their time singing, quarreling, smacking the
dressers and hair-dressers and buying one another glasses of cassis, beer, or even rhum, until the call-boy's bell rang.
Out of an army of a hundred thousand we must expect at least twenty thousand wounded, and we haven't stretchers, or bunks, or
dressers, or doctors enough for six thousand.