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"We used to come out here in the early morning, my little Schwester and I, to see which rose had unfolded its petals overnight, or whether this great peony that had held its white head so high only yesterday, was humbled to the ground in a heap of ragged leaves. Oh, in the morning she loved it best.
He had "promised to take a book to a friend." He would be back in a few minutes. Two hours did Dickie take for that errand, and I began to think that perhaps my joking had been unwise. Dickie now entered upon a chronic state of being "togged up." He treasured faded flowers, raising hue and cry because the maid threw out a wilted peony which he had enshrined in a vase on his chiffonier.
"O, nothing, Tom, but asserting my rights! I was only saluting the bride." "Against my will, Tommy," said the poor bride, blushing like a peony, and wiping the offended cheek with her checked apron. "And I'll make you pay dear for it, if there's law in the land," said Tom. "Poh, poh! don't make a fool of yourself," said Scatterly. "I don't mean to," answered the gardener, dryly.
The obvious desirability of such events to one of motherly type defrauded by fate of children was terribly impinged on by that old memory, and a solicitude for her "pretty" far exceeding what she would have had for a daughter of her own. What a peony regards as a natural happening to a peony, she watches with awe when it happens to the lily.
She tried to spread the belief that she was really the Supreme Being by forcing flowers artificially and then in the presence of her courtiers ordering them to bloom. On one occasion she commanded some peonies to bloom; and because they did not instantly obey, she caused every peony in the capital to be pulled up and burnt, and prohibited the cultivation of peonies ever afterwards.
Lindsey took his departure, shutting the parlour-door carefully behind him. Turning up the collar of his sack over his ears, he emerged from the house, and had barely reached the street-gate when he was recalled by the screams of Violet and Peony, and the rapping of a thimbled finger against the parlour window.
"Pooh, pooh! you flatter me," said Jack, blushing like a peony; "I've never done any thing for you." "Yes, you have, and you know it," persisted Bliffins. "Didn't you fight Lieutenant Jenkins, of the Salamander, when I ought to have fought him myself? Haven't you endorsed my notes when nobody else would back my paper?" "I'll do it again, my boy," said Jack, with a gush of enthusiastic feeling.
The elder child was a little girl, whom, because she was of a tender and modest disposition, and was thought to be very beautiful, her parents, and other people who were familiar with her, used to call Violet. But her brother was known by the style and title of Peony, on account of the ruddiness of his broad and round little phiz, which made everybody think of sunshine and great scarlet flowers.
You could almost see the rings made by rising trout, and there was enough of you visible at least to send the waterfowl scuttering from the reeds. Beyond that again, you could descry the pale ribbon of the footpath, and guess at the exuberant masses of the peony bushes, their heavy flowers, when they were white, still smouldering with the last of the sunset's fire.
He had an orchid in his button-hole a large one, very vivid and flamboyant. Jane had looked, rather, for a chrysanthemum one of those immeasurable blooms worn by the young men in Life. "But Dick will be individual," she acknowledged. "Thank goodness it wasn't a peony, or worse. He does look nice, if he is my brother; and he's the only young man I know with violet eyes."
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