"It's difficult to say, sir," said he.
It must have been.
"Do you think your roses will do well this year?" I went on.
He took off his glasses and looked at me. All the precise expression of the hall-porter had suddenly slipped from him. I could detect in his eyes a similar look to that which I see always in the eyes of Cruikshank when he is at work in his garden. Can this be the effect of just one word—roses? Will it in one moment convert a man from a machine into a human being with just that light of Nature in his eyes as plucks him there and then from the confusion of the crowd?
"How did you know I went in for roses, sir?" he asked.
I said that I had heard some one of the members mention the fact and it had interested me.
"I suppose you live in the country?" I added.
He shook his head, wiped his glasses—seemingly to no purpose, since he did not put them on again—and pushed aside some things upon his desk that were not the least in the way.
"I used to, sir; last year I did. I'd a little place at Loughton in Essex, not far from the Forest—Epping. It was quite the country there. I'd a nice bit of garden and a friend of mine living next door had a sort of nursery—a green-house and some ground—and he used to give me plants he didn't want. But it was too far away comin' up here in the winter early of a morning. So I got nearer London."
"You didn't give up your garden," I exclaimed, "just because it was a little difficult to get up to Town?"