In chapter 5 of Speak, Memory, Nabokov recalls that "In summer seldom less than fifteen people sat down for meals and when, on birthdays, this number rose to thirty or more, the question of place at table became a particularly burning one for Mademoiselle. Uncles and aunts and cousins would arrive on such days from neighboring estates, and the village doctor would come in his dogcart, and the village schoolmaster would be heard blowing his nose in the cool hall, where he passed from mirror to mirror with a greenish, damp, creaking bouquet of lilies of the valley or a sky-colored, brittle one of cornflowers in his fist."
I believe that no one but Nabokov could pass from mirror to mirror so lightly and poignantly and exquisitely within a single sentence. And just look at the remarkable adjectives--evoking tint, moisture, sound, texture, and rigidity--he gathers to describe those bouquets!
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Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Co-Editor, NABOKV-L