“What might be your name?” she asked.
There was no dodging now. The old woman spoke up as though to save me pain: “His name is Nicholas. But he is no kin to Lawyer Nicholas of Flagpond.”
After a long silence the girl said: “We came from Flagpond, once upon a time.”
She had been looking out the door at the clear bowl of the spring, and the reflection of the tall bushes, leaping in the wind.
I thought to myself: “She herself was John Kenton’s chief rose.” I thought: “He had her in mind when he set these ameliorating bushes through the wild.” Possibly the girl could not read or write. Yet she was royal.
Democracy has the ways of a jackdaw. Democracy hides jewels in the ash-heap. Democracy is infinitely whimsical. Every once in a while a changeling appears, not like any of the people around, a changeling whose real ancestors are aristocratic souls forgotten for centuries. As the girl’s eyes narrowed, she became Queen Thi, the masterful and beautiful potentate of immemorial Egypt whose face I have seen in a museum, carved on a Canopic jar. She was Queen Thi only an instant, then she became a Tennessee girl again, with the eyes of a weary doe.
She said: “Them roses give me comfort. That’s all the church I get.”
I asked: “Why are there so many roses between here and Greenville and none near Flagpond?”
It was her turn not to speak. The old woman as though to save her pain, answered: “The flowers of these parts were all brought in by John Kenton. He lived in Flagpond, but could not sell them there.”
And the mother of the little boy, the man-woman, whose husband had killed Kenton, broke her long silence: “The only flowers we have to-day are these he brought. I think we would die without them.... How do we get through the winter?”