ut
flowers. To her they were variously shaped and colored petals, poised,
at different seasons of the year, upon very similar green stalks; but to
him they were, in the first instance, bulbs or seeds, and later, living
things endowed with sex, and pores, and susceptibilities which adapted
themselves by all manner of ingenious devices to live and beget life,
and could be fashioned squat or tapering, flame-colored or pale, pure or
spotted, by processes which might reveal the secrets of human existence.
Denham spoke with increasing ardor of a hobby which had long been his in
secret. No discourse could have worn a more welcome sound in Katharine's
ears. For weeks she had heard nothing that made such pleasant music in
her mind. It wakened echoes in all those remote fastnesses of her being
where loneliness had brooded so long undisturbed.

She wished he would go on for ever talking of plants, and showing her
how science felt not quite blindly for the law that ruled their endless
variations. A law that might be inscrutable but was certainly omnipotent
appealed to her at the moment, because she could find nothing like it
in possession of human lives. Circumstances had long forced her, as
they force most women in the flower of youth, to consider, painfully and
minutely, all that part of life which is conspicuously without
order; she had had to consider moods and wishes, degrees of liking or
disliking, and their effect upon the destiny of people dear to her; she
had been forced to deny herself any contemplation of that other part of
life where thought constructs a destiny which is independent of human
beings. As Denham spoke, she followed his words and considered their
bearing with an easy vigor which spoke of a capacity long hoarded and
unspent. The very trees and the green merging into the blue distance
became symbols of the vast external world which recks so little of the
happiness, of the marriages or deaths of individuals. In order to give
her examples of what he was saying, Denham led the way, first to the
Rock Garden, and then to the Orchid House.

For him there was safety in the direction which the talk had taken.
His emphasis might come from feelings more personal than those science
roused in him, but it was disguised, and naturally he found it easy
to expound and explain. Nevertheless, when he saw Katharine among the
orchids, her beauty strangely emphasized by the fantastic plants, which
seemed to peer and gape at her