“You see I may fail with my tube-roses, but I am sure of these. By cutting back the plants, and making the earth soft and rich about them, I force splendid cutting that will root easily, and make nice plants for winter flowering. I have a cooler spot in my conservatory for verbenas.”
“Why, Susie, how much you know about the subject!” said Clara, admiringly, as Susie went on with her work.
“I know a little about botany, you see, and I learned a great many practical details at Anderson’s. You’ve no idea how kind he was and is to me. He has engaged to buy every tube-rose, orange-blossom, camellia, violet, and white-rose I can produce from October to April. I shall send my first orange-blossoms in a few days. At Christmas every camellia will bring fifty cents. I shall get forty-five if he retails them at fifty. I only had thirty last winter, but I ought to have at least fifty this coming winter, and the next winter, oh, Clara! I can have ten times that number easily; but I want some one to help me. Mrs. Buzzell is growing old, and cannot do as much of the house-work as she did, and I must not neglect my flowers.”
“Why should I not come with you?” asked Clara, enthusiastically. “Susie, I have an ‘impression,’ as the spiritualists say, that this is a heaven-appointed way for you and me to work out our salvation together. I can sell my watch, if necessary, though I would hate to do it. It is an elegant chronometer, given me by father Delano. I am crazy to work, Susie. Can I not do something now? Why should these fine verbenas lie here to rot, and here you have sweet-mignonette by the yard, all in blossom!”
“If I only had a place in the city for little bouquets, not the conventional style, but sweet little ones for the hair and to wear at the breast;” and while she was speaking, she took a spray of scarlet-verbena, set it around with mignonette and a bordering of apple-geranium leaves. “They ought to bring ten cents at this season—at least five.”
“Why, Susie, they could be sold by the thousand. I believe Miss Galway, my dressmaker, could dispose of any number. Let us set to work at once and make up a hundred of them, and you take them to her to-morrow, with a letter from me. I have her confidence, and can count on her assent. Nothing will be lost anyway, if we fail.” Susie seized the opportunity, and the work commenced. A layer of thirty just covered the bottom of the basket Susie provided—a very ugly basket, that came from the florist’s with Neapolitan violet roots. Five layers, one hundred and fifty bouquets, were ready before Clara left, and the next morning, at ten o’clock, were actually on sale in Miss Galway’s window, labeled “ten cents each.” Susie returned in high spirits. She had found Miss Galway charming. Two of the bouquets had been sold in five minutes. “Oh, Clara!” she exclaimed, “if I had only known, I could have kept her supplied all summer.” At the end of three days, Miss Galway wrote, enclosing twelve dollars, the balance after deducting commission. “The last of the flowers, Miss Galway said, had been sold toward evening, on the Common, by her little sister, who was anxious to sell more.” They had pleased Miss Galway’s customers, especially because of the rare fragrance of the geranium. Susie sent more, but the stock soon diminished, for she had not counted on this new market. The apple-geranium became precious, and new plans commenced to mature in Susie’s ever-active brain.
Meanwhile Mrs. Forest was anxious. Clara’s attention was being called away from the one string her mother constantly kept harping on—the reconciliation. Dr. Forest, however, encouraged the firm of “Dykes and Delano,” as he called it, and promised to put some money into the “concern.” He was delighted at Clara’s first successful idea. “What a thoroughly woman’s way of doing things,” he said. “No man would ever have had the cheek to impress a dressmaker into the flower business. Go on; you two women have good business notions, and you are sure of success.” Mrs. Forest heard these encouragements with inward pain, and finally, when she could not endure the silence of Clara’s husband any longer, she wrote to him herself. Her letter was a masterpiece of shallow tact. What he read very plainly “between the lines,” was, that he had only to whistle for Clara, and she would fly to him like a submissive spaniel; though Mrs. Forest had by no means intended to make him too confident. She had dwelt long upon the duty to society devolving upon married people, and upon the necessity of circumspect conduct in husbands. The answer came immediately, and was a triumph to Mrs. Forest, who lost no time in bringing the matter up before the doctor and Clara. That day Clara had felt wretched, and had kept her room. She had suffered one of those inevitable relapses, which all those who have “loved and lost” can perfectly understand. It is one of the tricks Love plays us, to leave an impress of his own divine beauty in the heart, through whatever form he has gained entrance there. Clara had been mourning her dead for months, and the agony had only returned on that day, as it had often returned before. The worst of it had been endured, when her father came in in the afternoon. “To-day is a bad day for you, darling, I see. Life is a grasshopper, isn’t it?” This was one of his distortions of the text, “The grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail.”
When Mrs. Forest came in, an hour later, Clara was lying on the lounge and the doctor was reading to her. Mrs. Forest, feeling in a very complaisant mood, and not wishing to present immediately the subject of Albert’s letter, sat down to her sewing, and begged the doctor to go on reading. He finished some ten pages of a critique on Heat as a Mode of Motion, by Professor Tyndall.
“Well, I call that ponderous,” said Mrs. Forest, greatly relieved when the reading ended. “Do you really find anything interesting in that, Clara?”
“Certainly I do, mamma dear. Why do you ask?”