solitary people going about, each with
a gloomy salesman leading. The run of them look uncomfortable; some are
hot about the ears and in the spiteful phase of ill-temper; all look
sick of the business except the raw new-comers. It's the only time they
will ever select any furniture, their first chance and their last. Most
of their selections are hurried a little. The salesman must not be kept
all day.... Yet it goes hard with you if you buy your Object in Life and
find it just a 'special line' made to sell.... We're all amateurs at
living, just as we are all amateurs at furnishing--or dying. Some of the
poor devils one meets carry tattered little scraps of paper, and fumble
conscientiously with stumpy pencils. It's a comfort to see how you go,
even if you do have to buy rubbish. 'If we have _this_ so good, dear, I
don't know _how_ we shall manage in the kitchen,' says the careful
housewife.... So it is we do our shopping in the Great Emporium."

"You will have to rewrite your Ballade," said I, "and put all that in."

"I wish I could," said the poet.

"And while you were having these very fine moods?"

"Annie and the shopman settled most of the furniture between them.
Perhaps it's just as well. I was never very good at the practical
details of life.... Cigarette's out! Have you any more matches?"

"Horribly depressed you are!" I said.

"There's to-morrow. Well, well...."

And then he went off at a tangent to tell me what he expected to make by
his next volume of poems, and so came to the congenial business of
running down his contemporaries, and became again the cheerful little
Poet that I know.

THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS

During the early Victorian revival of chivalry the Language of Flowers
had some considerable vogue. The Romeo of the mutton-chop whiskers was
expected to keep this delicate symbolism in view, and even to display
his wit by some dainty conceits in it. An ignorance of the code was
fraught with innumerable dangers. A sprig of lilac was a suggestion, a
moss-rosebud pushed the matter, was indeed evidence to go to court upon;
and unless Charlotte parried with white poplar--a by no means accessible
flower--or apricot blossom, or failing these dabbed a cooling dock-leaf
at the fellow, he was at her with tulip, heliotrope, and honeysuckle,
peach-blossom, white jonquil, and pink, and a really overpowering and
suffocating host of attentions. I suppose he got at last to
three-cornered notes in the