"Do you know?" she said, and then checked herself. She was about to remind him that these were the first flowers which he ever gave her, and to laugh at him good-humoredly for having been so slow in divining one of her passions. But the idea struck her that the gift might be, for the very reason of its novelty, too significant to be a proper subject for her comments.
"Do you know," she continued, after a scarcely perceptible hesitation, "that I am not so fond of flowers as I was once? They remind me of Louisiana, and I—don't love Louisiana."
"But this is thanking you very poorly for your present," she added, after another and longer pause. "You know that I am obliged to you. Don't you?"
"I do," said Colburne. He had been many times repaid for his offering by seeing the pains which she took to preserve it and place it to the best advantage.
"It is very odd to me, though, that you never seemed to love them," she observed, reverting to her first thought.
"It is my misfortune. I have a pleasure the less. It is like not having an ear for music."
"How can you love poetry without loving flowers?"
"I knew a sculptor once who couldn't find the slightest charm or the slightest exhibition of capacity in an opera. I had a soldier in my company who could see perfectly well by daylight, but was stone blind by moonlight. That is the way some of us are made. We are but partially developed or, rather, not developed equally in all directions. My æsthetic self seems to be lacking in button-holes for bouquets. If I could carry a landscape about in my hand, I think I would; but not a bunch of flowers."
"But you love children; and they are flowers."
"Ah! but they are so human! They make a noise; they appreciate you comprehensibly; they go after a fellow."