“Because they are blue.”
“H-m! Blue!” he still looked about him. “Perhaps I’m growing blinded by all the beauty hereabouts, but I don’t see anything blue.”
She laughed again, delighted with his stupidity.
“If you look into those barrows,” she pointed, “you’ll see the blue truants. They belong in the blue beds, but they got loose somehow and cropped up all over the place. I’ve been spending my hours hunting them out. Don’t you see where we have been digging?”
Then Richard saw the great gashes, and admitted his folly. Everything was so wonderful and colossal he had not been able to see the defects, he told her. By this time his eye was taking in the spreading expanse of yellow field.
“‘And then my heart with rapture fills,’” he quoted, “‘and dances with the——’ I don’t see any daffodils.”
Even the negroes laughed at this.
“Have I said something stupid?” he asked. “Don’t blame me; blame Wordsworth. I’m sure he said daffodils—but perhaps he only did it for the rhyme. If Jawn were here he’d make a limerick to fit black-eyed Susans.... But just why are daffodils so funny?”
“Daffodils are a spring flower, my dear Richard,” Mrs. Wells began to explain.
“Of course they are!” Richard remembered. “Wretchedly stupid of me. But I never can keep pace with that kind of information. I never know when it is kite time or top time.... We’ll have to bring Wordsworth up to the minute. How is this: