After a little searching he discovered the huge tree, far towering above oak and pine and palm, set with lustrous clusters, ivory and palest gold, exhaling incense.[293]
"Wonderful," she said under her breath, when he pointed it out to her. "This enchanted land is one endless miracle to me."
"You have never before been in the South?"
"I have been nowhere."
"Oh. I thought perhaps when you were a child——"
"We were too poor. My mother taught piano."
"I see," he said gravely.
"I had no childhood," she said. "After the public school, it was the book section in department stores.... They let me go last week. That is how I came to be in the Heikem galleries."
He clasped his hands around one knee and looked out across the semi-tropical landscape.
Orange-coloured butterflies with wings like lighted lanterns fluttered along the edges of the flowering shrubs; a lovely purplish-black one with four large, white polka dots on his wings flitted persistently about them.