Lothair by Benjamin Disraeli

"Belmont is the only house I know that is properly lighted," said Mr. Phoebus, and he looked with complacent criticism round the brilliant saloons. "I would not visit any one who had gas in his house; but even in palaces I find lamps-it is too dreadful. When they came here first, there was an immense chandelier suspended in each of these rooms, pulling down the ceilings, dwarfing the apartments, leaving the guests all in darkness, and throwing all the light on the roof. The chandelier is the great abomination of furniture; it makes a noble apartment look small. And then they say you cannot light rooms without chandeliers! Look at these-need any thing be more brilliant? And all the light in the right place-on those who are in the chamber. All light should come from the side of a room, and if you choose to have candelabra like these you can always secure sufficient."

Theodora was seated on a sofa, in conversation with a lady of distinguished mien and with the countenance of a Roman empress. There were various groups in the room, standing or seated. Colonel Campian was attending a lady to the piano where a celebrity presided, a gentleman with cropped head and a long black beard. The lady was of extraordinary beauty-one of those faces one encounters in Asia Minor, rich, glowing, with dark fringed eyes of tremulous lustre; a figure scarcely less striking, of voluptuous symmetry. Her toilet was exquisite-perhaps a little too splendid for the occasion, but abstractedly of fine taste-and she held, as she sang, a vast bouquet entirely of white stove-flowers. The voice was as sweet as the stephanopolis, and the execution faultless. It seemed the perfection of chamber-singing-no shrieks and no screams, none of those agonizing experiments which result from the fatal competition of rival prima-donnas.