For our pretty blonde neighbor had ambitions, or _had_ had, as she once
hinted to me with a dainty sadness. When I somehow let slip to her that I
had repeated her delicately balanced words to my wife she gave me one
melting glance of reproach, and thenceforth confided in me no more beyond
the limits of literary criticism and theology--and botany. I remember we
were among the few roses of her small flower-beds at the time, and I was
trying to show her what was blighting them all in the bud. She called them
"rose-es."
They rarely bloomed for her; she was always for being the rose herself--as
Monsieur Fontenette once said; but he said it with a glance of fond
admiration. Her name was Flora, and yet not flowers, but their book-lore,
best suited her subtle capriciousness. She made such a point of names that
she could not let us be happy with the homely monosyllable by which we
were known, until we allowed her to hyphenate us as the Thorndyke-Smiths.
There hung in our hall an entire unmarred beard of the beautiful gray
Spanish moss, eight feet long. I had got this unusual specimen by
tiptoeing from the thwarts of a skiff with twelve feet of yellow crevasse-
waters beneath, the shade of the vast cypress forest above, and the bough
whence it hung brought within hand's reach for the first time in a
century.
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