"I think of setting up a doll, Miss Jenny," he said.
"You had better not," replied the dressmaker.
"Why not?"
"You are sure to break it. All you children do."
"But that makes good for trade, you know, Miss Wren," he returned.
"I don't know about that," Miss Wren retorted; "but you'd better by half set up a pen-wiper, and turn industrious, and use it."
"Why, if we were all as industrious as you, little Busy Body, we should begin to work as soon as we could crawl, and there would be a bad thing!"
"Do you mean," returned the little creature with a flush suffusing her face, "bad for your backs and your legs?"
"No, no," said the visitor, shocked at the thought of trifling with her infirmity. "Bad for business. If we all set to work as soon as we could use our hands, it would be all over with the dolls' dressmakers.
"There's something in that," replied Miss Wren, "you have a sort of an idea in your noddle sometimes!" Then, resting one arm upon the elbow of her chair, resting her chin upon that hand, and looking vacantly before her, she said in a changed tone: "Talking of ideas, my Lizzie, I wonder how it happens that when I am working here all alone in the summer-time, I smell flowers. This is not a flowery neighborhood. It's anything but that. And yet as I sit at work, I smell miles of flowers; I smell rose-leaves till I think I see the rose-leaves lying in heaps, bushels, on the floor; I smell fallen leaves, till I put down my hand--so--and expect to make them rustle; I smell the white and the pink May in the hedges, and all sorts of flowers that I never was among. For I have seen very few flowers indeed in my life."