sh
out your jars and vases with a mop every time you changed the flowers,
and wipe them on a towel separate from the ones used for the pantry
glass? No, you never did! You tipped the water out over there at the end
of the piazza by the honeysuckles, because you couldn't quite bring
yourself to pouring it down the pantry sink, refilled the vases, and
that was all!"

In spite of a certain sense of annoyance that I felt at the way in which
Maria was giving me a lecture, and somehow when a person has taught for
ten years she (particularly _she_) inevitably acquires a rather
unpleasant way of imparting the truth that makes one wish to deny it, I
stood convicted in my own eyes as well as in Maria's. It had so often
happened that when either Barney had brought in the sweet peas and left
them on the porch table, or Bart had gathered a particularly beautiful
wild bouquet in one of his tramps, I had lingered over a book or some
bit of work upstairs until almost the time for the next meal, and then,
seeing the half-withered look of reproach that flowers wear when they
have been long out of water, I have jammed them helter-skelter into the
first receptacle at hand.

Sometimes a little rough verbal handling stirs up the blood under a
too-complacent cuticle. Maria's preachment did me good, the more
probably because the time was ripe for it, and therefore the past two
weeks have been filled with new pleasures, for another thing that the
month spent in the open has shown me is the wonderful setting the
natural environment and foliage gives to a flower. At first the
completeness appeals insensibly, and unless one is of the temperament
that seeks the cause behind the effect, it might never be realized.

The Japanese have long since arrived at a method of arranging flowers
which is quality and intrinsic value as opposed to miscellaneous
quantity. The way of nature, however, it seems to me, is twofold, for
there are flowers that depend for beauty, and this with nature that
seems only another word for perpetuity, upon the strength of numbers, as
well as those that make a more individual appeal. The composite
flowers--daisies, asters, goldenrod--belong to the class that take
naturally to massing, while the blue flag, meadow and wood lilies,
together with the spiked orchises, are typical of the second.

By the same process of comparison I have decided that jars and vases
having floral decorations themselves are wholly unsuitable for holdi