fore I can
get the sense of it. It is three things, I am sure, because
after the voice stops these three things run through my mind,
just as quick as the voice came and went away: A thought
which is full of mystery; another one that is terrible; and
the third which is strange but very funny. The third seems to
be connected with Mother in some way; something she said
many, many years ago.... I asked Mother to talk that way, and
she talked like old country women, but it was not the voice I
asked for."

I have read this many times, unable to interpret. One of the loveliest
things about the child-mind is its expectancy for answers, for
fulfilments at once.

"I do not know what it means," I said. "If some answer came, I could not
be sure that it was the perfect one, but I am thinking about it every
day, and perhaps something will come."

These are serious things.... Here is one of her more recent products on
Roses:

If one wants to have perfect beauty and the odour of the Old
Mother herself in his yard, he will plant roses. I cannot
express in words what roses bring to me when I look down at
them or sniff their magnificently shaded petals. They seem to
pull me right out of the body and out into another world
where everything is beautiful, and where people do not choose
the red ramblers for their garden favourites, but the real
tea roses.

I took three roses into a house--a red one, a white one, very
much finer than the first, and the third a dream-rose that
takes me into the other world--the kind of yellow rose that
sits in a jet bowl leaning on the cross in the Chapel room
every day.

A girl that was in that house looked at the roses.

"Oh," she shouted, after a moment, "what a grand red one that
is!"

"Which one do you like best?" I asked.

"The red one, of course," the girl answered.

"Why, the other two are much----" I began.

"No, they ain't," said the girl. "Don't you know every one
likes them red ones best?"

I walked away. I believe that city people who never see
Nature, know her better from their reading than country
people who are closer to her brown body (than those who walk
on pavements) but never look any higher. And I think country
people like red roses because they are like them. The red
roses do not know they are