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He was far more of a hot-house plant than his daughter, so he caught a violent cold from his drenching in the chilly fall rain, which made itself promptly known with much sneezing before he had gone to bed that night. Arethusa was thoroughly conscience-stricken when he was unable to get up the next morning. She felt personally responsible for his aches and pains and his fever.

The Major was a Jerseyman, and had been somewhat of a free-liver in his time, retaining some of the propensities of his youth in old age, as is apt to be the case with those who cultivate a vice as if it were a hot-house plant.

The four little reception-rooms, or boudoirs, were so many cabinets for treasures, and on the night of the ball, like the rest of the rooms on this floor, were entirely without further adornment; only the white marble of the spiral stair was festooned with crimson roses; and the narrow hall that led from the rotunda to the new ballroom was dressed in imitation of a long arbor of grape-vines, and hung with clusters of hot-house grapes and Chinese lanterns.

Plate-glass, and hot-house plants, and rare patterns, are the especial inheritance of the rich; but any family may command all the requisites of a Ward case for a very small sum. Such a case is a small glass closet over a well-drained box of soil. You make a Ward case on a small scale when you turn a tumbler over a plant.

She picked hot-house flowers, hoping to propitiate Abel. There woke a great hope in her to win him. But she failed. He glowered at her when she appeared walking beside his mother, while before them marched Mr. Churchouse carrying the departed. When the funeral was ended and Abel left alone, he sat down by the grave, cried, worked himself into a very mournful mood and finally exhibited anger.

She tested the resources of his income by all sorts of instigation to expenditure, which his gallantry could not withstand; she encouraged him to talk of his deeds in arms; she was friendly, almost affectionate, and most bountiful in the presents of fruit, peaches, nectarines, grapes, and hot-house wonders, that she showered on his table; but she was an enigma in her evident dissatisfaction with him for something he seemed to have left unsaid.

"We should like to argue this matter with a regular Tory Lord, whose members vote steadily against the Catholic question. 'I wonder that mere fear does not make you give up the Catholic question! Do you mean to put this fine place in danger the venison the pictures the pheasants the cellars the hot-house and the grapery?

The sophistication of the world, the flippant irony of Gerty's voice gave place immediately before her earnest dignity and before the look of large humanity which distinguished her so vitally from the women whom he knew. He felt her sincerity of purpose at the same instant that he felt Gerty's shallowness and the artificial glamour of the hot-house air in which he had hardly drawn breath.

One thinks and one thinks how one can get the most good out of it; and a new gown, or a day's pleasure, or some hot-house fruit, or some piece of elegance that can be seen and noticed in one's drawing-room, carries the day, and good-by to prettily decked looking-glasses. Now here, money is like the air they breathe.

Refreshments were served us, among which were some hot-house peaches, ethereally delicate as if they had grown in the Elysian Fields and been stolen from a banquet of angels. After this we went out on the lawn, where, at Lady William Compton's request, I recited one or two poems; the only time I did such a thing in England.