Mary had the ceremony of the pansy covering. She covered them with leaves and made mysterious passes over their visible little forms.
“Pansies for thought, sleep as you ought,
Sleep, but awake for your true lover’s sake,”
Mary repeated as she did this; it was the incantation of her childhood.
Florimel took up the dahlias. The girls had early recognized their own types, and had distributed tasks accordingly. Florimel’s dark, vigorous beauty was suited to dahlias as well as Mary’s quiet loveliness harmonized with pansies. With the dahlia bulbs Florimel executed a solo march, formal steps and courtly gestures its ritual.
So the morning went on, filled with work, but work brightened to play, and elevated close to poetry by all sorts of curious fancies. Mary, Jane, and Florimel were serious, almost reverent in their fantastic ceremonies. Though they were almost grown up, the association of these things with childish faith made the day and its events to them something between fantasy and reality.
Mrs. Garden watched them, participating in what they did, as far as she was able, with the keenest enjoyment and no less wonder. This curious day brought her into touch with her children’s lost childhood. She realized what clever little beings they had been, developing in their own way, set apart by their father’s theories of education. The pang with which she realized this, her pride in them and regret for the days in which she had been separated from them, days never to be recovered, showed her how far she had travelled from the old Lynette Devon, whose joy had been the public; how far toward Lynette Garden, whose increasing joy was in being her beautiful and gifted children’s mother.
Joel Bell was an amazed witness of the Slumber Day ceremonies. What they represented he could not imagine; why “great girls like these should carry on so” he could still less imagine. He wheeled barrowloads of straw and leaves, dug and tied and trenched, with unvarying gravity, but his pitying disapproval peeped forth.
Noon afforded the first moment when conversation was possible. One of the unwritten laws of Slumber Day was that no talking was allowed; participants in ceremonies are not supposed to converse while they are going on. Joel availed himself of this interlude.
“Say, Mis’ Garden,” he began, “about that nus’ry you was thinkin’ of foundin’. Seem’s if it couldn’t hardly be, ’thout they was a widder, or some such woman, ready to let the children be dumped with her. Who’d look after ’em?”