The brother and sister laughed delightedly at their neighbor’s ideas of natural beauty.
“Perhaps it was fortunate that Dorothy didn’t have a hot-house to draw on,” said Roger, moving from one side to another of his cousin’s rockery in order to get the best view of its remaining loveliness.
“Dorothy has too much sense. In the first place she snuggled hers in here under the trees, just the way the rocks are naturally over in FitzJames’s Woods. Then she brought over here exactly the plants she found there.”
“It had to look as if it were a bit of the woods, didn’t it?”
“Do you want me to be in this picture?”
“You look too dressed up.”
“Thank you! This is a middy I’ve worn all summer, and I’m just wearing out the rags of it on Saturdays.”
“Nevertheless, you dazzle me.”
“That’s a polite way of saying you don’t want me in the foreground. You’d better put in what Miss Daisy calls ‘contemporaneous human interest.’ I’m a great addition to any picture in which I appear.”
“You are, ma’am, of course,” replied Roger with exaggerated politeness, “but I think I’d like you under an arbor in a graceful attitude and not hobnobbing with these wild flowers.”