“The fireplace is good enough for mine.”
Off strode Mr Purchase towards the window and Mr Carter towards the fireplace. I stopped them.
“How can you be so ridiculous?”
“It is to avoid being made ridiculous that I propose to deposit them in the gutter. If you will not deign to overlook their too obvious unworthiness, then let them suffer the extremity of shame, and be the sharers of my humiliation.”
“I want nothing which you despise, so here go my rosebuds into the grate.”
Off they strode again; again I stopped them.
“Rather than that you should behave in that foolish and wicked way—treating those lovely flowers so cruelly—I will take both your nosegays. Though, mind you, if you don’t understand, I do—my doing so is the height of absurdity.”
Before I had finished speaking both of them came rushing at me, and there was I standing with Doris’ red roses in my right hand and Audrey’s pink in my left. I scarcely knew whether to laugh or cry, the situation was so surprising. What those two girls would say when they appeared upon the scene—as I momentarily expected that they would do—I did not even dare to think. And those two boys allowed me no chance to collect my thoughts, and try to see my way out of the muddle into which they were getting me. They kept on chattering, one against the other, and making the muddle worse with every word they uttered.
Mr Purchase began, speaking with an absurdly cock-a-doodle air, as if I had done him the greatest possible favour by consenting to hold Doris’ flowers for a moment or so, for that was really as far as I intended my acquiescence to go.
“Now, Miss Norah, that you have made me supremely happy by accepting my now rich roses——”