"So long till next time!" returned the sage, settling himself down to his book. "O revower!"
As Philip ran along Doomington Road he could not help halting at the floral establishment half-way home which recently had initiated a forlorn crusade against the artistic apathy of the neighbourhood. Already, it was evident, the high ideals of Madame Smythe, Floriste, were being tarnished by the rust of compromise. She had opened her establishment with a blaze of purely floral splendour. There were rose trees entering into bloom, lilies, bunches of garden flowers, democratic pots of geranium and fuchsia, tall tulips, narcissi; and as a subfusc groundwork, wooden boxes of bulbs, manures, weed killers, syringes and packets of seed. It was not long before young vegetables were introduced, ostensibly on the ground that vegetables such as potatoes and peas had a floral as well as a dietetic significance. And now hoary potatoes, full-grown carrots, unblushing turnips, made an almost animal show among the fragility of creeper and flowers.
None the less Madame Smythe's shop was the nearest thing to poetry in the concrete that Philip had yet encountered. Not a day passed but that Philip on his return from school flattened his nose against the floristic window-pane, his eyes dazzled with delight, albeit calceolaria and hyacinth equally were mere words to him.
One day he observed that a new glory arose from Madame Smythe's tallest and most expensive vase. It took the shape of three flowers which he had not seen before (he had not seen them for the reason that Madame Smythe opened the shop in spring, and the new-comers were autumn flowers). They were fluffy masses of numberless soft yellow petals, bending slightly on their stalks like a gracious and lovely woman. Oh, the rapture of burying a nose in these fragrant sweet cushions, the rapture of seeing one of them upon his mother's blouse till her own brown eyes caught additional gold from the gold of these blooms!
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily,
he murmured. Ah, the scrumptious hollyhocks! That's what they were of course! Hollyhocks! "Heavily hangs the hollyhock!" That's just what these flowers were doing! He had no sooner coupled the name with the flower than by the easiest process in the world the flower and the name became one. No wonder Tennyson wrote poetry about hollyhocks! Just look how each little petal curled so exquisitely, each petal fresh as morning, yet chiselled finely into perfect form!
"Wouldn't it be spiff to buy a hollyhock and give it to mother, saying (as one always said in romance), 'For the Fairest!' then bowing gallantly!" he mused. "What can I do? I get a ha'p'ny a week, when I'm good, from father. I'll be good for three weeks. That'll be three-ha'pence. Then I'll go in and buy a hollyhock. Oo, what fun!"
The second and third halfpennies were added to the first, not without depressions in the barometer of virtue. He shyly entered the shop of his ambitions.
"Can I have a hollyhock, please, ma'am!"
"A hollyhock? I'm sorry, young man, we don't keep no hollyhocks!"