“An amazingly distinguished flower, hollyhock!” said Guy, “it always gives a cachet to its surroundings, so different from sweetpeas, which look sordid in a dusty station garden, and fragrantly bourgeois beside the suburban lawn on which Miss Smith is playing tennis in lavender muslin....”
“Guy!” cried Lady Cust, looking round anxiously at the company, and laughing apologetically; Guy, however, went on undaunted; “but hollyhock is like the signature of a great painter, it testifies that any subject can be turned into art—or, rather, into that domain which lies between painting and poetry, where damoizelles, dressed in quaintly damasked brocades, talk of friendship and death and the stars in curious stiff conceits.”
“Guy! You are a duffer,” laughed Lady Cust again.
“Well, here come some of these damoizelles in their quaint brocades—do you think they are talking about friendship and death and the stars?
“Do you think they are talking about friendship and death and the stars? Do you think they are talking about friendship and death and the stars?” said Hugh Mallam with his jolly laugh, and he nodded towards Concha and Elfrida Penn and Lettice Moore and Winifred Norton, who, dressed in a variety of pale colours, were walking arm in arm up the border.
Sainte-Beuve in a fine passage describes the moment in a journey south when “en descendant le fleuve, on a passé une de ces lignes par delà lesquelles le soleil et le ciel sont plus beaux.”
Such a line—beyond which “the sun and the sky are more beautiful”—cuts across the range of every one’s vision; and the group of flower-bordered girls were certainly beyond that line for all who were watching them. Once again Teresa felt as if she were suddenly seeing the present as the past; and as long as she lived it would always be as that picture that she would see Concha’s wedding.
“Vera incessu patuit dea,” murmured Hugh, and then he added, a little wistfully, “they do look jolly!”
“You’d look just as jolly far off, in that light, Hugh,” said Dick, who was sitting blinking at his flowers, like a large, contented tom-cat.