lustrous beds, as poets write. She had the poetic
passion for flowers. Perhaps her taste may now seem questionable. She
cherished the old-fashioned delight in tulips; the house was reached on
a gravel-path between rows of tulips, rich with one natural blush, or
freaked by art. She liked a bulk of colour; and when the dahlia dawned
upon our gardens, she gave her heart to dahlias. By good desert, the
fervent woman gained a prize at a flower-show for one of her dahlias,
and `Dahlia' was the name uttered at the christening of her eldest
daughter, at which all Wrexby parish laughed as long as the joke could
last. There was laughter also when Mrs. Fleming's second daughter
received the name of 'Rhoda;' but it did not endure for so long a space,
as it was known that she had taken more to the solitary and reflective
reading of her Bible, and to thoughts upon flowers eternal. Country
people are not inclined to tolerate the display of a passion for
anything. They find it as intrusive and exasperating as is, in the
midst of larger congregations, what we call genius. For some years, Mrs.
Fleming's proceedings were simply a theme for gossips, and her vanity
was openly pardoned, until that delusively prosperous appearance
which her labour lent to the house, was worn through by the enforced
confession of there being poverty in the household. The ragged elbow was
then projected in the face of Wrexby in a manner to preclude it from a
sober appreciation of the fairness of the face.

Critically, moreover, her admission of great poppy-heads into her garden
was objected to. She would squander her care on poppies, and she had
been heard to say that, while she lived, her children should be fully
fed. The encouragement of flaunting weeds in a decent garden was
indicative of a moral twist that the expressed resolution to supply
her table with plentiful nourishment, no matter whence it came, or how
provided, sufficiently confirmed. The reason with which she was stated
to have fortified her stern resolve was of the irritating order, right
in the abstract, and utterly unprincipled in the application. She said,
`Good bread, and good beef, and enough of both, make good blood; and
my children shall be stout.' This is such a thing as maybe announced
by foreign princesses and rulers over serfs; but English Wrexby,
in cogitative mood, demanded an equivalent for its beef and divers
economies consumed by the hungry children of the authoritative woman.
Pr