"Striking!" I said. "I never heard a more inadequate word. I call them simply overwhelming—the steam-rollers of the vegetable world. Look at their great yellow open faces."
"I never," said Francesca, "saw a steam-roller with a face. You're mixing your metaphors."
"And," I said, "I shall go on mixing them as long as you grow sunflowers. It's the very least a man can do by way of protest."
"I don't know why you should want to protest. The seed makes very good chicken-food."
"Yes, I know," I said, "that's what you always said."
"And I bet," she said, "you've repeated it. When you've met the tame Generals and Colonels at your club, and they've boasted to you about their potatoes, I know you've countered them with the story of how you've turned the whole of your lawn into a bed of sunflowers calculated to drive the most obstinate hen into laying two eggs a day, rain or shine."
"I admit," I said, "that I may have mentioned the matter casually, but I never thought the things were going to be like this. When I first knew them and talked about them they were tender little shoots of green just modestly showing above the ground, and now they're a forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlock aren't in it with this impenetrable jungle liberally blotched with yellow, this so-called sunflower patch."
"What would you call it," she said, "if you didn't call it sunflower?"
"I should call it a beast of prey," I said. "A sunflower seems to me to be more like a tiger than anything else."
"It was a steam-roller about a minute ago."