arborescence

"And finally, beyond the winter-garden, through the various kinds of arborescence which from the street made the lighted window appear like the glass front of one of those children's playthings, pictured or real, the passer-by, drawing himself up on tiptoe, would generally observe a man in a frock-coat, a gardenia or a carnation in his buttonhole, standing before a seated lady, both vaguely outlined like two intaglios cut in a topaz, in the depths of the drawing-room atmosphere clouded by the samovar—then a recent importation—with steam which may escape from it still today, but to which, if it does, we have grown so accustomed now that no one notices it."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 229-230 of the Modern Library paperback edition