"Sleeping-garden!"
"Miss Renie, I just wish you could see it—all laid out in roses in summer, and a screened-in pergola, where I sleep, right underneath the stars and roses. I sleep so close to heaven I always say I can smell it."
She turned her little face, white as a spray of jasmine against a dark background of night, toward him. "Underneath a pergola of roses! I guess it's the roses you must smell. How grand!"
"Sometimes when—if you come to Cincinnati I want to show you my place, Miss Renie. If I say so myself, I got a wonderful garden; flowers I can show you grown from clippings from every part of the world. If I do say so, for a sausage-maker who never went to school two years in his life it ain't so bad. I got a lily-pond, Miss Renie, they come from all over to see. By myself I designed it."
"It must be grand, Mr. Hochenheimer."
"On Sunday, Miss Renie, I like for my boys and girls from the factory to come up to my place and make themselves at home. You should see my old mother how she fixes for them! I wish you could see them boys and girls, and old men and women. In a sausage-factory they don't get much time to listen to birds and water when it falls into a fountain. I wish, Miss Renie, you could see them with the flowers. I—well, I don't know how to say it; but I wish you could see them for yourself."
"They like it?"
"Like it! I tell you it's the greatest pleasure I get out of my place. I wish, instead of my fine house, the city would let me build my factory for them right in the garden."
"On such a stylish street they wouldn't ever let you, Mr. Hochenheimer."
"Me and my mother ain't much for style, Miss Renie. Honest, you'd be surprised, but with my fine house I don't even keep an automobile. My mother, she's old, Miss Renie, and won't go in one. Alone it ain't no pleasure; and when I don't walk down to my factory the street-cars is good enough."