I knew their contents
the moment I set eyes on them, and yet it was none the less a
heart-warming surprise.
Down in a near-by market is a little florist's shop, so small that one
might pass twenty times without noticing it; the man, a local authority,
who has kept it for years, makes a specialty of the great long-stemmed
single violets, whose fleeting fragrance no words may express. They call
them Californias now, but they are evidently the opulent kin of those
sturdy, dark-eyed Russian violets of my mother's garden, and as they mean
more than any other flower to me, Evan always brings them to me when I
come to town. This morning he trudged out in the snow, hardly thinking
this man would have any, but by mere chance the grower, suspecting snow,
brought in his crop the night before, and in spite of the storm I had the
first morning breath of these flowers of a day.
Miss Lavinia sniffed and sighed, and then buried her aristocratic, but
rather chilly, nose in the mass. "I feel like a young girl with her first
bouquet," she said presently.
"Ah, how good it is to be given something with a meaning. Most people
think that to be able to buy what they wish, within reason, is perfect
happiness, but it isn't. Barbara, you and this man of yours quite
unsettle me and shake my pet theories. You show sides of things in my own
birthplace that I never dreamed of looking up, and you convince me, when
I am on the wane, that married friendship is the only thing worth living
for.
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