"You should take it easier, Mr. Hochenheimer."
"All our lives, Miss Renie, we've been so busy, my mother and me, I tell her we got to be learnt—like children got to be learnt to walk—how to enjoy ourselves. We—we need somebody young—somebody like you in the house, Miss Renie—young and so pretty, and full of life, and—and so sweet."
She gave a gauzy laugh. "Honest, it must seem like a dream to have a rose-garden right on the place you live."
"I wish you could see, Miss Renie, a new Killarney my gardener showed me in the hothouse yesterday before I left—white-and-pink blend; he got the clipping from Jamaica. It's a pale pink in the heart like the first minute when the sun rises; and then it gets pinker and pinker toward the outside petals, till it just bursts out as red as the sun when it's ready to set."
"And those beautiful little tan roses you sent me, Mr. Hochenheimer;
I—"
"Ah, Miss Renie, the clipping from those sunset roses comes from Italy; but now I call them Renie Roses, if—if you'll excuse me. I tell you, Miss Renie, you look just enough like 'em to be related. Little satiny gold-looking roses, with a pink blush on the inside of the petals and a—a few little soft thorns on the stem."
"Aw, Mr. Hochenheimer, I ain't got thorns."
Out from the velvet shadows his face came closer. "It's thorns to me, Miss Renie, because you're so pretty and sweet, and—and seem so far away from a—plain fellow like me."
"I—"
"I'm a plain man, Miss Renie, and I don't know how to talk much about the things I feel inside of me; but—but I feel, all-righty."