I went, then, and I found myself in a room large enough, well lit by candles. There penetrated the slightest glimmer of sunshine. It was a dressing room, as I supposed, looking at the furniture, though much of it was of forms and uses unknown to me, but there towered a table draped with a gold mirror, and at first I realized that it was the toilet of a large lady.
If I could identify this object so readily, without a great lady sitting before it, I can not say. In a chair, a ball resting on the floor of the toilet and his head leaning on his hand, sat the strangest lady I have ever seen and I will be ever allowed to see.
was dressed in a very luxurious fabrics - silks and satins and lace - and all in white. The shoes were white, a long white veil descended from the hair, the wedding flowers adorned her hair, but they were white. Some jewels sparkled on her neck and hands, and other shone there on the table. More clothes, less luxurious than those he wore, and half-filled trunks, were scattered everywhere. She must not have finished dressing, because he wore only one shoe, and the other was on the table next to her hand - her veil was not styled in half, watch and chain were still there, along with a lace to put on his chest, the handkerchief , gloves, and some flowers and a prayer book, all piled in disorder about the mirror.
It was in those few moments that I made out all those things, well, the first glance revealed to me more than you might imagine. I saw that everything was in the room, and that should have been white, he had been a long time ago, and now had lost its brightness, was faded and yellow. I saw the bride in wedding dress had withered like the dress, like flowers, and left the other glory than that of sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been cut for the full forms of a young woman, and that the figure on what time it collapsed was all skin and bones. (...) It was when I
found myself standing before her, avoiding her gaze, I noticed every detail of the things around her, and I realized that the clock was stopped at nine and twenty pendula in the room was too firm on nine winds.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Chapter Eight.
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