"
"I must," she said, "consult an oculist. Perhaps he will give me glasses
which will unblock my eye and make me see tigers in the garden."
"No," I said, "you will have to do it for yourself. For such an eye as
yours even the best oculists are unavailing."
"I might," she said, "improve if I read poetry at home. Has any poet
written about sunflowers?"
"Yes," I said, "BLAKE did. He was quite mad, and he wrote a poem to a
sunflower: 'Ah! Sunflower! Weary of time.' That's how it begins."
"Weary of time!" she said scornfully. "That's no good to me. I'm weary
of having no time at all to myself."
"That shows," I said, "that you're not a sunflower."
"Thank heaven for that," she said. "It's enough to have four children to
look after--five including yourself."
"My dear Francesca," I said, "how charming you are to count me as a
child! I shall really begin to feel as if there were golden threads
among the silver."
"Tut-tut," she said, "you're not so grey as all that."
"Yes, I am," I said, "quite as grey as all that and much greyer; only we
don't talk about it."
"But we _do_ talk about sunflowers," she said, "don't we?"
"If you'll promise to have the beastly glaring things dug up--"
"Not," she said, "before we've extracted from them their last pip of
chicken-food.
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