Pine-breeze was such a scatterbrain that if you sent her down town in a hurry for eggs she would, as likely as not, dawdle home in an hour with tomatoes and some wild tale picked up on the way, pleasant and interesting enough, no doubt, but useless for the purpose of making an omelette. She would leave Leslie’s bath unprepared, and then, sitting in her own tub, would clap her hands with horror at the remembrance of her own forgetfulness, and as likely as not attempt to rectify her error attired in a bath towel; and she would smash things—crockery ware understood—with almost the facility of your Western parlor-maid. To make up for these bad points, she was literary above her class; had a passion for flowers above her fellows, and had composed a poem about a grasshopper.
Lotus-bud was the cook; her infirmity was weakness. She would sit and listen to Pine-breeze’s idle chatter and let the bread burn. Pine-breeze could work and talk, but Lotus-bud could not even work and listen. So she would sit with her hands in her lap, listening. She made a splendid audience but a somewhat indifferent cook.
As for Cherry-blossom, she was purely and simply an idler, a lotus-eater, a hobboe in the guise of a butterfly. A thing so fragile and pretty, so perfectly dressed and so seemingly boneless, that you felt to expect work from her would be absurd; which, indeed, it would have been.
For she never worked, she dreamed.
She was enamored of a riksha man, and she would go out and meet him under the lilacs at the gate, and then vanish with him to goodness knows where for the evening.
He was the strangest natural phenomenon, this lover of Cherry-blossom’s, for he was always changing in size, and his face was never scarcely twice alike, and his number—rikshas are numbered just like hansom cabs—was
255.
66.
7.
103.
and 42.
At least Pine-breeze, who was an observant body, got that far in her notation, and then gave it up as a bad job.
All these things, and more, Campanula had to cope with, and she did so with more or less success, gaining in her experience much that a girl of her age is supposed not to know, but losing nothing either in gentleness or modesty.
She brought Pine-breeze to a vague sense of the wrongfulness of flighty ways, and with her own little hands she made new bread to replace a batch of loaves burnt to cinders by Lotus-bud (bread that gave Leslie indigestion for a week).