Flowers are so bound up with the lives of the children of Japan that they have a meaning and speak a language to them almost unknown to us.
So Campanula sat immersed in her dream, and Leslie, who had swung a hammock between two cherry trees and was lying in it, little knew what was going on in the small head of the person seated near him on the square of matting. She had been doing some needlework, but her work had dropped in her lap, her hands were folded, and her eyes were fixed on the azalea bush.
Next day, or perhaps the day after, for a man’s perceptions in these matters are sometimes dull, he noticed a change in her. He could not say what it was, but the submissive and humble person, the very fact of whose existence was a theme for perpetual self-excuse, had somehow changed. She was just as submissive and humble, but there was a subdued joyousness in her manner when excusing her existence as though she thought that somehow it might not be such a frightful crime after all, and perhaps capable of condonation some day.
Then, when he called for his cigar-case Pine-breeze did not appear with it, though Pine-breeze loved to be the carrier of it, because it was a foreign thing, and the leather smelt deliciously.
Campanula brought it and a match-box, a thing that Pine-breeze’s flighty little mind nearly always forgot.
A few days before, Leslie had possessed three servants and what he called an adoptive daughter. Then he suddenly found himself in the possession of four servants, one of them more attentive than the other three put together. He put it down to the fact that her housewifely instincts were awakening, and as the change in her wrought for his comfort and ease he did not speculate on the cause as he would have done had the reverse been the case.
Women are curious creatures, as the philosophic Mac once said. But on the whole, in their way, I think men are just as strange.
Kite-flying had now been put aside with other childish things, and the tiny hands that had grasped the sugar-candy dragon were now preparing to grasp the real business of life: a business whose main objective was the happiness and comfort of “He who is taller than the tallest of trees.”
Pine-breeze, Lotus-bud, and Cherry-blossom. Looking at them in a row, you might have thought them pretty much alike, as far as mind and spirit were concerned, just as three sleek, well-groomed ponies may seem identical—until you try to drive them.
It was not till Campanula took the reins that she found the three underlings were each afflicted with a special infirmity, or rather special infirmities.