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And she, bless her heart and the hearts of all good women who give up the joy of their lives to us poor unworthy creatures, she stood by the wax-flower wreath under the glass case on the whatnot in the corner, and wept into her real lace handkerchief, and wished with all the earnestness of her soul that she could think of some way to let John know that his trousers leg was wrinkled over his left shoe top.
Renouard! Haven't you something comforting to say?" He looked up, as surprised as if a voice from heaven had spoken with this perfect society intonation, and by the puzzled profundity of his blue eyes fluttered the wax-flower of refined womanhood. She continued.
I wanted to play on the piano, but I didn't dare to not with all those dead-hair and wax-flower folks in the parlor watching me, and the chance of Father's coming in as he did before. I was standing in the window staring out at nothing it wasn't quite dark yet when again I had that queer feeling that somebody was looking at me. I turned and there was Father.
Then there was geum, and pale blue-fringed campanulas, and rich lilac asters, yellow violets, the white scented wax-flower, arnica and yellow aconite, both excellent medicines; there were thunder-flowers, and blood-drops, and grass of Parnassus, and hundreds more, all cut down by the scythes.
Is it that the injured and indignant soul so vindicates its own essential and divine strength, and says, unconsciously, to the most uncontrolled anguish, "There is in me a life no mortal accident can invade; the breath of God is not altogether extinct in any blast of man's devising; shake, torture, assault the outer tenement, darken its avenues with fire to stifle, and drench its approaches with seas to drown, there is that within that God alone can vanquish, yours is but a finite terror"? Half-crazed as I was, the fern-bed attracted me, as I said, and I flung myself wearily down on the leaves, whose healing and soothing odor stole up like a cloud all about me; and I lay there in the sun, noting with pertinacious accuracy every leaf or bloom that was within the range of sight, the dark green leaves of the wax-flower springing from their red stem, veined and threaded with creamy white, stiff and quaint in form and growth, the bending sprays of goldenrod that bowed their light and brittle stems over me, swaying gently to and fro in the gentle wind, the tiny scarlet cups of moss that held a little drop of dew brimming over their rims of fire, a spark in the ashy gray moss-beds where they stood, the shrinking and wan wood-asters, branched out widely, but set with meagre bloom, every half-tint of the lichens, that scantily fed from the relentless granite rock, yet clung to its stern face with fearless persistence, the rough seams and velvet green moss-tufts of the oak-trunks, the light that pierced the dingy hue of oak-leaves with vivid and informing crimson: all these stamped themselves on my mind with inevitable minuteness; the great wheel of Fate rolled over me, and I bore the marks even of its ornamental rim; the grooves in its tire left traces of its track.
"Isn't it wonderful," she whispered out of her white wrap, "to think of poor Arthur sleeping there, so near to our dear lovely Felicia, and not knowing the immense joy in store for him to- morrow." There was such artificiality in the wax-flower lady that nothing in this speech touched Renouard. It was but the simple anxiety of his heart that he was voicing when he muttered gloomily
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