Thus I explained it one day to Mrs. Fontenette, as she touched
its ends with a delicate finger.
"Tillandsia"--was her one word of response. She loved no other part of
botany quite so much as its Latin.
"The Baron ought to see that," said Monsieur. He was a man of quiet
manners, not over-social, who had once enjoyed a handsome business income,
but had early--about the time of his marriage--been made poor through the
partial collapse of the house in Havre whose cotton-buyer he had been,
and, in a scant way, still was. "When a cotton-buyer geds down, he stays,"
was all the explanation he ever gave us. He had unfretfully let adversity
cage him for life in the only occupation he knew, while the wife he adored
kept him pecuniarily bled to death, without sharing his silent resigna--
There I go again! Somehow I can't talk about her without seeming unjust
and rude. I felt it just now, even, when I quoted her husband's fond word,
that she always chose to be the rose herself. Well, she nearly always
succeeded; she was a rose--with some of the rose's drawbacks.
When we asked who the Baron might be it was she who told us, but in a
certain disappointed way, as if she would rather have kept him unknown a
while longer.
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