"All there is," I said provokingly. And I did not hurry.
"Why must you have wild thyme there?" he grumbled.
"So as not to disappoint the blue butterflies," I said gravely. "They 'know a bank' and this is it. They've had an understanding with my mother about it for years. If they don't find thyme here they're annoyed. They go on dying out. My mother says a world without blue butterflies would be a poor sort of place."
We talked irrelevancies for a moment more—the passion of the convolvulus moth for petunias, and the other flowers the different sorts of moths and butterflies preferred.
He was surprised to hear that for years my mother had taken all that trouble to please even the ordinary red admirals and spotted footmen and painted ladies. I explained that I was re-planting this thyme only to please my mother. "Personally," I had never bothered much about the butterfly-garden, I said, in what he promptly called a superior tone.
I maintained that the pampered creatures were dreadful "slackers" and sybarites—all for colour and sweet scents.
He stood listening a moment to the bees' band playing in the rhododendron concert, and then he defended the butterflies. Butterflies were much misunderstood. "In their way—and a very good way, too—they answer to the call."
"What call?"
"The call to serve the ends of life."
I looked up, surprised, from my fresh thyme patch, for general moralisings were not much in Eric's way. "What are the ends of life?"