"Vi'lerts! Swee' Vi'lerts! Pennyer bunch!"
Good morning, Jane! How sweet you and your violets look in the tangle of traffic that laces and interlaces itself about Alfred Gilbert's Mercury.
Morning by morning, fair or foggy, she stands by the fountain; and if you give her more than a passing glance you will note that her tumbled hair is of just the right shade of red, and in her eyes are the very violets that she holds to your indifferent nose, and under her lucent skin beat the imperious pulses of youth.
Jane is fourteen, and Jane is always smiling; not because she is fourteen, but because it's such fun to be alive and to be selling flowers. Indeed, she looks herself like a little posy, sweet and demure. Times may be bad, but they are not reflected in Jane's appearance.
Of education she has only what the Council School gave her in the odd hours when she choose to attend; of religion she has none, but she has a philosophy of her own, which, in a sentence, is To Get All The Fun You Can Out of Things.
That's why Jane's smile is a smile that certain people look for every morning as they alight from their bus in the Circus. But you must not imagine that Jane is good in the respectable sense of the word. Let anyone annoy her, or try to "dish" her of one of her customers. Then, when it comes to back-chat, Jane can more than hold her own in the matter of language; and once I saw an artillery officer's face turn livid during a discussion between her and a rival flower-girl.
The war has hit Jane very badly. The young bloods who frequented her stall in the old days, and bought the most expensive buttonholes every morning, are now in khaki, and a thoughtless Army Order forbids an officer to decorate his tunic with a spray of carnations or a moss-rose.
There are only the old bounders remaining, and their custom depends so much on such a number of things—the morning's news, the fact that they are not ten years younger, the weather, and the state of their digestions.
Jane always reads the paper before she starts work, because, as she says, then you know what to expect. She doesn't believe in meeting trouble halfway, but she believes in being prepared for it. When there's good news, stout old gentlemen will buy a bunch of violets for themselves, and perhaps a cluster of blossoms for the typist. But when the news is bad, nobody is in the mood for flowers. They want to band themselves together and tell one another how awful it is; which, as Jane says, is all wrong.
"If they'd only buy a bunch of violets and stick it in their coats, other people would feel better by looking at them, and they'd forget the bad news in the jolly old smell in their buttonhole."