“Not really!”
“Honest Injun, as Priscilla says.”
“These borders are sweet.” The girl let her gaze wander up and down the curving lines of color splashed across the gentle slope of the hill. “But flowers don’t stand much chance in a war year, do they? I know people at home who have plowed theirs up and planted potatoes.”
“A mistake,” said Aunt Jessica, shaking the dirt vigorously from a fistful of sorrel. “A mistake, unless it is a question of life and death. We have too much land in this country to plow up our flowers, yet a while. 149 And a war year is just the time when we need them most. No, I never feel I am wasting my time when I work among flowers.”
“But they’re not necessary, are they?” questioned Elliott. “Of course, they’re beautiful; but I thought luxuries had to go, just now.”
“Flowers a luxury? Oh, my dear little girl, put that notion out of your head quickly! American-beauty roses may be a luxury, and white lilacs in the dead of winter, but garden flowers, never! Wait till you see the daffodils dancing under those apple trees next spring!” And she nodded up the grassy slope at the apple trees as though she and they shared a delightful secret that Elliott did not yet know.
Privately the girl held a different opinion about next spring, but she wondered why Aunt Jessica should talk of daffodils. They seemed rather lugged into a conversation in July.
Mother Jess reached with her clawlike weeder far into the border. Her voice came back over her shoulder in little gusts of words as she worked. “Did you ever hear that saying of the Prophet?—‘He that hath two loaves let him sell one and buy a flower of the narcissus; for bread is food for the body, but narcissus is food for the soul.’ That’s the way I feel about flowers. They are the least expensive way of getting beauty and we can’t live without beauty, now less than ever, since they have destroyed so much of it in France. There! now I must stop for to-day. Don’t you want to take this culling-basket and pick it full of the prettiest things you can find for Mrs. Gordon? Perhaps you would like to take it over to her, too. It isn’t a very long walk.”
“But I’ve never met her.”