On more than one occasion visitors have thanked me for having left them these goodnight thoughts.
Of course, being a cottage in the midst of a flower-patch, we never run short of flowers, and you find plenty indoors. When they are in bloom, however, I always like to put a bunch of white moss rose-buds (one of my favourite flowers) in a blue mug on a visitor’s dressing-table.
But whatever the flowers, it is our custom to welcome all guests with rosemary, for I have discovered that the scent of it (even the sight of it) is a certain cure for the divers maladies caused by overdoses of unsatisfactory dressmakers, cooks who give notice every month, much boredom in crowded unventilated drawing-rooms, and all the many varieties of restlessness that have been invented to help women to kill time. It has also been known to prove efficacious in cases of people prone to overwork.
At any rate, if you come to visit me you will find a vase with sprigs of rosemary on the deep window-ledge in your room; and few of my friends go away without taking a slip from the gnarled bush by the door to plant in less congenial surroundings.
I believe Shakespeare said that rosemary typifies remembrance; Virginia unblushingly improves on Shakespeare by insisting that it means the remembrance of peace.
IV
Miss Quirker—Incidentally
Every visit to the cottage seems prefaced with a scramble. Either the work at the office suddenly does itself up in a tangle, or the domestic arrangements show signs of incipient paralysis, which it takes all my available energy to avert, or else it is people who inflict themselves upon me when I’m at my final gasp without a moment, or a single company smile, to spare for anybody. And of all the three forms of irritation, the uninvited people are the worst; for they always seem to absorb the last bit of vitality left me, which I had hoped would just carry me over the journey.
There is Miss Quirker, for instance. You don’t know Miss Quirker? How I envy you!