Mona bent over Lucy's writing-table in the window. "I suppose you are not used to picrocarmine," she said. "It is only a 'venous congestion,' but it is cut far too thick. I can give you a much better one."
"Just scribble 'venous congestion' on the label, will you t before I forget again. Now I think of it, Miss Clark told me it must be 'venous congestion,' because that was the only red one we had mounted on a large slide! You will be shocked to hear, Mona, that I made Father take me to hear Dr Dudley lecture last night. That man's voice is worth a fortune!"
"Far too thick," repeated Mona, with unnecessary emphasis. "You can make out nothing with the high power at all. Where was he lecturing?"
"To his Literary Society. Angela Davidson sent a note to tell me. It really was magnificent—on The Rose in Tennyson.[[1]] I thought I knew my Tennyson, but Dr Dudley's insight seemed to me perfectly wonderful. He was showing how, all through Tennyson's poems, the red rose means love, and he showed it in a thousand things I had never thought of before. He began with The Gardener's Daughter, and with simple idyllic quotations, like—
'Her feet have touched the meadows,
And left the daisies rosy.'
[[1]] The following sketch was suggested by a very beautiful but as yet unpublished paper, by a friend of the author.
And he showed us how the whole world becomes a rose to the lover. You know the passage, beginning, 'Go not, happy day.' Then he worked us gradually on to the tragedy of love,—
'I almost fear they are not roses, but blood.'
It made one's flesh creep to hear him say that. And again triumphantly,—
'The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.'