Margaret left her work to him, and, taking possession of his den, divided her attention between a book, and watching Dora at play with Aurelia outside.
Since they left the city the child had been set loose from all city restraints, and turned out to consort with bees and grasshoppers, harrowing the soul of Mrs. James by the number and heinousness of her soiled frocks and stockings, but drawing in full draughts of health. Both Dora and her father were bankers. But his bank in the city dealt in paper and specie; hers was a flower-bank. When she wanted him to buy her anything, she brought him buttercups, which were gold dollars with handles to them, and he scrupulously kept account and returned her change. No lover could wear in his buttonhole the rosebud presented by his lady's hand with a more tender pride than this father cherished for the bunch of wildflowers given him by his little daughter.
Mrs. Lewis approached the minister's table, and began turning over his books. "I don't know anything," she said mournfully, opening a Greek copy of Homer, and passing her fingers caressingly over the dear little quaint letters. "Wallace, wasn't it?—that poor Horace Binney—
'Doubly dead,
In that he died so young,'
writes of the 'arrowy certainty of Grecian phrases.' Woe is me! I cannot get at the point. I can only see the feathering."
Margaret looked up with an exclamation from the book in her hand. "Listen! Coleridge, à propos of having republished his earlier poems without correction, writes, 'I was afraid of disentangling the weed for fear of snapping the flower.' Snapping! only a poet would have chosen that word. The flower-stem that you can snap must be of sudden and luxuriant growth, made up of water and color, with just fibre enough to hold the two together. As I read that, I thought instantly of a red tulip bursting up bright and hasty through the moist, warm mould. That sends me outdoors. I want to see weeds and flowers growing tangled together."
"Wait a little and let me go with you," Mr. Southard said. "And meantime let Mrs. Lewis read us one of her poems, as she promised to do."
Mrs. Lewis had been for years one of those pretty lady writers of which the country is full, by no means an artist, or dreaming of any such distinction, but writing acceptably to her friends, and sometimes pleasing a not too critical public. But she had abjured the pen from the day when a friendly publisher, meaning to compliment her, issued a volume of "Extracts" from her writings.
"A volume!" she cried in dismay. "Why not a bottle? There were my poor little fancies torn from their homes and set up in rows, like flies and bugs transfixed on pins. I shuddered. I wrote no more."