Current Favourite Sentence

They were all glad to laugh, but the Procurator, secretly sentimental, remembered a pot of cyclamen which he had put outside his door two days ago to be thrown away as dead, its white petals soft and flabby, its beauty extinguished, and how the charwoman, instead of throwing it away, had stood it in a bowl of water, and in an hour it was blooming again, every petal taut like a little sail.