'A couple of dozen named bulbs, all good.'
'I will help you to carry down the glasses and roots. Where are they?'
'In the drawing-room. We kept the glasses there all summer in the chiffonnier.'
'I hope you will be able to spare me one or two for my study.'
'Of course you shall have a supply in your window. They were procured partly for Mr. Pennycomequick and partly for my mother.'
'You say "of course"; but I do not see the force of the words. Remember I have had a lodging-house experience; my sense of the fitness of things is framed on that model, and my landlady never said "of course" to anything I suggested which would give me pleasure, but cost her some trouble. I am like Kaspar Hauser, of whom you may have heard; he was brought up in a solitary dark cell, and denied everything, except bare necessaries; when he escaped and came among men, he had no notion how to behave, and was lost in amazement to find they were not all gaolers. I had on my chimney-piece two horrible sprigs of artificial flowers, originally from a bridecake, that from length of existence and accumulation of soot were become so odious that at last I burnt them. The landlady made me pay for them as though they were choice orchids.'
'You must not make me laugh,' said Salome, 'or I shall drop the glasses from under my arms.'
'Then let me take them,' said Philip promptly; 'you have two in your hands, that suffices. I tire you with my reminiscences of lodging-house life?'
'Not at all—they divert me.'
'It is the only subject on which my conversation flows. I do not know why it is that when I speak on politics I have a difficulty in expressing my ideas, but when I come on landlady-dom, the words boil out of my heart, like the water from a newly-tapped artesian well. I have a great mind to tell you my Scarborough experiences.'