Hudson River Bracketed by Edith Wharton

Vance slept nearly as long as he had metaphorically accused the inhabitants of Paul's Landing of doing. When he woke he saw a pattern of rippling foliage on the ceiling of his room, and a bar of sunlight lying across the floor. The air that came in through the window was sultry with heat, and flies buzzed against the pane. Looking about him at the streaked and faded wallpaper, his clothes heaped up on a broken-down verandah chair, and the water jug with a chipped spout on the old-fashioned washstand, he felt a qualm of homesickness, and thought longingly of the spring sunsets across the fields at Crampton, and the perfume of his grandmother's neglected lilacs. So strong was the impression that the perfume was actually in his nostrils. He raised himself on his elbow, and there, on the pillow, lay a spray of white lilac, filling the room with June.

-"Well, that's nice of them," Vance thought, burying his face in the ivory-coloured clusters. He remembered his grandmother's once saying, as they sat on the Crampton porch on a hot June evening: "I guess that box of ointment Mary Magdalen broke over our Lord's feet must have been made out of lilacs, " and he had liked the fancy, and wished he knew how to make a poem out of it, rich and heavy with perfumed words. His grandmother's random fancies often stirred his imagination in this way.