For , you see , so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately , that Alice had begun to thinkthinkthat very few things indeed were really impossible .
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying , smokingsmoke, as was his custom , innumerable cigarettes , Lord Henry Wotton could just catchcatchthe gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum , whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs ; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flittedflitacross the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window , producing a kind of momentary Japanese effecteffect, and making him thinkthinkof those pallid , jade-faced painters of Tokyo who , through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile , seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion .