“The furniture was stained a light buff, and the upholstering was a delicate cretonne livened by exquisite tracings of wisteria.
“The carpet was light blue, surrounded by a border of deeper blue, lightly emphasized by suggestions of trailing arbutus.
“Despite all this,” continued the lady sadly as she paused to enjoy an intentness of interest on the part of the bewildered Dennis, so profound that the dickey backs had been permitted to fall unregarded to the ground, and their printed extravagances, by contrast with this unusual recital, relegated to the most prosaic of occurrences, “despite all these precautions, the most carefully guarded recesses are not entirely secure.
“For one day an elaborately protected package arrived during my absence, and my husband opened it.
“At once a pungent, overpowering sweetness filled the air, and the very surfeit of its fragrance threw my husband into a convulsion of delight which ended in a stupor so replete that we were able only to restore the poor man to consciousness by hypodermics of—what was to him a most violent stimulant—Cambric Tea.”
Dennis looked his astonishment at these accumulating refinements, and in the pause that followed the narration of this last episode he inquired, with the appreciative hesitation of one who is reluctant to advance lest he destroy the dew-gemmed tracery of a fragile spider’s web.
“An’ what kind of flowers did all this?”
“Cape Jessamine,” replied the lady; “and we were never able to discover who sent them.
“His physicians claimed that his disorder was paralleled by similar disturbances instanced in pathological records, but that the contributing causes were different and that my husband’s particular debility was not induced by his devotion to flowers but aggravated by it.
“To further complicate matters, the physician assured me that to deprive the invalid of his floral diversions would be to remove his remaining impulse to continued existence.