Humbert moves into Haze house

Humbert Humbert arrives in Ramsdale in the summer of 1947 with the intention of renting a room from the McCoo family, whose house has just burned down. The McCoo's friend, Charlotte Haze, offers to accommodate him at 342 Lawn Street. Humbert, angry and disappointed, plans to leave immediately for the Bermudas or the Bahamas, but his European politeness compels him to accept the arrangement. He is driven to the Haze house in a funeral-like car, and upon arrival, he is struck by the dingy, gray-white frame house, which he immediately dislikes. He tips the chauffeur and hopes to double back unnoticed to his hotel, but the man crosses the street, leaving Humbert no choice but to ring the bell.

The Haze House and Charlotte Haze

A colored maid lets Humbert in and leaves him standing on the mat. The front hall is decorated with door chimes, a Mexican wooden thingamabob, and van Gogh's "Arlésienne." A door ajar reveals a living room with more Mexican trash and a striped sofa. As Humbert stands mopping his brow and staring at an old gray tennis ball on an oak chest, Charlotte Haze's contralto voice comes from the upper landing, asking, "Is that Monsieur Humbert?" A bit of cigarette ash drops from above. She descends the steps in sandals, maroon slacks, and a yellow silk blouse, her index finger tapping on her cigarette. Humbert describes her as a poor lady in her middle thirties with a shiny forehead, plucked eyebrows, and features that are a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich. Her very wide-set sea-green eyes have a funny way of traveling all over him, carefully avoiding his own eyes. She leads him into the parlor and talks about the McCoo fire and the privilege of living in Ramsdale. Humbert recognizes her as one of those women whose polished words reflect a book club or bridge club, but never her soul, and he is perfectly aware that if he became her lodger, she would methodically proceed to involve him in a tedious affair.

The Room and the Bathroom

Despite his utter rejection of the place, Humbert is led upstairs to "his" room, which Charlotte calls a "semi-studio." He discerns above the bed Renée Prinet's "Kreutzer Sonata" and finds the room absurdly and ominously cheap. He firmly tells himself to leave at once. Old-world politeness, however, obliges him to continue the ordeal. They cross the landing to the right side of the house, where Charlotte and Lo have their rooms. Humbert is granted a preview of the only bathroom, a tiny oblong between the landing and Lo's room, with limp wet things overhanging the dubious tub, a question-mark hair inside, and the expected coils of a rubber snake and a pinkish cozy covering the toilet lid. Charlotte, sensing his lack of favor, lets her hand rest on his sleeve and assures him he will be very comfortable, then offers to show him the garden.

The Garden and the Revelation

Reluctantly, Humbert follows Charlotte downstairs, through the kitchen, and into the dining room, where he notices a white sock on the floor. He gropes for his timetable, surreptitiously fishing it out to look for a train. Still walking behind Charlotte through the dining room, beyond it there comes a sudden burst of greenery—"the piazza," sings out his leader. Then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swells under his heart. From a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there is his Riviera love peering at him over dark glasses. It is the same child—the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hides from his aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts he had fondled one immortal day. He recognizes the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight, he sees again her lovely indrawn abdomen where his southbound mouth had briefly paused, and those puerile hips on which he had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts—that last mad immortal day behind the "Roches Roses." The twenty-five years he had lived since then taper to a palpitating point and vanish. He finds it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition. In the course of the sun-shot moment that his glance slithered over the kneeling child, the vacuum of his soul managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these he checked against the features of his dead bride. A little later, of course, this nouvelle, this Lolita, his Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype. All he wants to stress is that his discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that "princedom by the sea" in his tortured past. Everything between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy. Everything they shared made one of them. As the Haze woman and he go down the steps into the breathless garden, his knees are like reflections of knees in rippling water, and his lips are like sand. Charlotte says, "That was my Lo," and "these are my lilies." Humbert replies, "Yes, they are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful."