She had first glimpsed the curtains as she walked through the front door into the big hall outside, and she had been astonished, as though she had caught a glimpse of an old friend from long ago, someone she had worshiped and had never dreamed of seeing again. There were the curtains her father had told her about, and they were exactly as he had told her they would be. And he had never seen them finished. During the months before his death, Rose’s life had been full of talk about velvet, and he had brought home bits of velvet to show her — rose velvet and red velvet, several different colors of green velvet, a yellow velvet that was called amber but that he said was old gold, mouse-colored velvet and orange velvet and blue, his favorite color, every shade of it. Many of the other men and women who had been working in Ramsay’s a long time had been delegated to do this or that job in connection with the decoration of Mrs. Ramsay’s house, and to Rose’s father she had given the task of finding the velvet for the curtains. He had to find the right weight of velvet and the right color to go with the wallpaper, which had been chosen from an English firm that supplied the best houses in London, Mrs. Ramsay had told Rose’s father. He brought a scrap of the paper home to show to Rose, and the samples of velvet that he had collected, and they went over them together every evening, and in the morning he took them back to the shop. He wasn’t able to bring all the samples to show to Rose — there were some, made in Italy, that he dared not risk losing — but those he could not bring home he described to her. He said that Rose had a very unusual sense of color, and he was proud when, after he had the samples all arranged on the kitchen table, she put her finger on the colors she favored, and they were always the colors he favored, too.