He chuckled and waved in the direction of the garden plot at the side of the house. “Not but what I take a pride in it myself,” he added as he caught my interested and not wholly unappreciative glance.
To glance at Wanza’s garden was to receive a dizzying impression of pink and white bloom, pranked round by shining smooth rocks of uniform size and whiteness. The flash and dazzle of it struck blindingly on the eyes. It was Wanza-like. I got up, descended the porch steps, and went to the garden, the better to inspect its glamour and richness. Rows of pink holly-hocks, clusters of sweet William, trellises of sweet peas, fluffy red peonies, pink and white poppies bordering beds of tea roses breathed of Wanza. And yet—the wild things at Cedar Dale pleased her best, I knew.
Captain Lyttle seemed to be reading my thoughts, for he said facetiously:
“It’s a fairly purty garden, to my notion, but there ain’t anything in it as good as the swamp laurel and lupine at Cedar Dale, accordin’ to Wanza. She don’t hold by cultivated flowers no more, she says. Give her the wood-flowers as grows wild and hides away, she says. And that reminds me, Mr. Dale, I got that bird you give her at Christmas on my hands, too. ‘Poor old Dad,’ she says, ‘will have him for company. He’s mine,’ she says, ‘he’s mine. But, Dad, what’s mine is yours.’ Meanin’ I’m to take care ’o him.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Come along in to Wanza’s room and have a look at him.”
I was getting new side lights on Wanza’s character to-day. Even her room was an elucidation. It was small, with a long narrow window on the south side and a door that opened into the garden. The walls were bright with gay sprigged paper, the bed was white as a snow heap, the curtain at the window was spotless and looped with pink ribbon. Wood-work and floor were painted green, also the wooden bed and small dresser. There was a green tissue paper shade on the lamp on the table; and green paper rosettes were wreathed around cheap prints and fastened with gilt headed tacks to the walls. But in spite of its tawdriness the room had a fragrance of lavender, a nicety that was comforting. It was a little girl’s room. Indeed, I spied a fat-faced wax doll in one corner seated on a balloon-like pink silk cushion; and on a shelf with an impossible beaded lambrequin stood a Dresden-china lamb and a wax cupid in a glass case.
The canary’s cage hung in the window, clouded in folds of pink mosquito bar. But the canary itself was on the limb of a flowering currant bush outside the window. I chirruped to it, but it contented itself with chirruping back, and I left it unmolested. As I looked around the room again my eye was arrested by a snap-shot picture of Joey and myself framed in bark and covered with the inevitable pink mosquito netting, standing on a small table at the head of Wanza’s bed. Above it on the wall hung a Christmas card I had given Wanza, bearing Tiny Tim’s message “God bless us every one.”
Grif Lyttle evinced considerable pride as he showed me the room. His genial face beamed, and his eyes shone as he looked about him from the green rosettes to the beaded lambrequin and back to me.
“Snug little nest, eh?” he hazarded. Meeting my appraising eye his face twisted into an odd look of whimsical interrogation. “Some girl—what? Know any finer—ever see a prettier?”
“No,” I answered.
“Nowhere?”