till in the woods."

"I think I'll make a covering for a glass bowl we have at home,"
declared Ethel Brown, who was diligently snipping ends of stems as she
listened.

"A glass bowl doesn't seem to me suitable," answered her aunt. "Can you
guess why?"

Ethel Brown shook her head with a murmured "No." It was Della who
offered an explanation.

"The stems aren't pretty enough to look at," she suggested. "When you
use a glass bowl or vase the stems you see through it ought to be
graceful."

"I think so," responded Mrs. Smith. "That's why we always take pleasure
in a tall slender glass vase holding a single rose with a long stem
still bearing a few leaves. We get the effect that it gives us out of
doors."

"That's what we like to see," agreed Mrs. Morton. "Narcissus springing
from a low bowl is an application of the same idea. So are these few
sprays of clematis waving from a vase made to hang on the wall. They
aren't crowded; they fall easily; they look happy."

"And in a room you would select a vase that would harmonize with the
coloring," added Margaret, who was mixing sweetpeas in loose bunches
with feathery gypsophila.

"When we were in Japan Dorothy and I learned something about the
Japanese notions of flower arrangement," continued Mrs. Smith. "They
usually use one very beautiful dominating blossom. If others are added
they are not competing for first place but they act as helpers to add to
the beauty of the main attraction."

"We've learned some of the Japanese ways," said Mrs. Emerson. "I
remember when people always made a bouquet perfectly round and of as
many kinds of flowers as they could put into it."

"People don't make 'bouquets' now; they gather a 'bunch of flowers,' or
they give you a single bloom," smiled her daughter. "But isn't it true
that we get as much pleasure out of a single superb chrysanthemum or
rose as we do out of a great mass of them?"

"There are times when I like masses," admitted Mrs. Emerson. "I like
flowers of many kinds if the colors are harmoniously arranged, and I
like a mantelpiece banked with the kind of flowers that give you
pleasure when you see them in masses in the garden or the greenhouse."

"If the vases they are in don't show," warned Mrs. Smith.

Mrs. Emerson agreed to that.

"The choice of vases is almost as important as the choice of flowers,"
she added. "If the stems are beautiful they ought to show and you must
have a transparent vase, as you said about