"They don't look so."
"You can't tell about people from their looks."
"Can't you? But I am sure you can, Norton, partly. People don't look stupid when they feel bright, do they?"
Norton laughed a good deal at this. "But then, Pink," he remarked, "you must remember people are used to it. You have never seen it before, you know, and it's all fresh and new. It's an old story to them."
"Does everything grow to be an old story?" said Matilda rather thoughtfully.
"I suppose so," said Norton. "That makes people always hunting up new things."
Matilda wondered silently whether it was indeed so with everything. Would her new dresses come to be an old story too, and she lose her pleasure in them? Could the Park? could the flowers?
"Norton," she broke out, "there are some things that never grow to be an old story. Flowers don't."
"Flowers—no, they don't," said Norton; "that's a fact. But then, they're always new, Pink. They don't last. They are always coming up new; that's the beauty of them."
"I do not think that is the beauty of them," Matilda answered slowly.