"Those seedling hollyhocks we put out last spring, Taliaferro, make a good show. They'll bloom this year," from Auntie. "So'll these Canterbury bells I brought down from the Buxton's garden, bloom for the first time. I want to put in quite a good deal this spring with a thought to next fall, dahlias and astors and cosmos and salvia in plenty. I don't know anything that comes at a time you're more grateful to 'em, than the late-blooming things in the fall."
"Look at these he'ah lockspuhs, Miss Ann 'Liza," from Uncle Taliaferro direfully. "Same thing as las' yeah. Worm right at the root of ev'ey pesky las' one. Never did have no faith in that wood-ashes you's so sure about, myse'f."
Flowers take patience and faith, and tendance and waiting. Would she, Selina, looking down on the little backyard and these two patient workers in it, ever come to a place like Auntie, where she could care for them enough to center time and hope and affection in them?
Never! Never! She threw her arms out in refutation of any such surrender in herself!
"Flowers take patience and faith, and tendance and waiting."
Which brought to her mind that she promised Mamma and Auntie answers to certain pleas from both of them before another week-end. And at this her hands clenched in further refutation, this time of their claims. For wherever and however she arrived now, it was going to be through truth and for herself! Undoubtedly she would have to hurt Mamma and hurt Auntie, which last was even harder, but at least she would be honest in doing it.
Passionately she put on her hat and jacket again and left her room and hurried down the stairs and out of the house. The show and feel of late April were everywhere, in the green of the lawns, in the buds of the shrubberies, in the unfolding blooms of the magnolia trees, in the soft languor of the dusk already falling.
Three blocks away Selina turned in at the brick rectory next the church she had gone to all her life.