THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS
"Oh, yes," said the salesgirl in the florist's shop, in answer to my question, as she twisted purple tinfoil around the stems of my violets, "we find out a good deal about our customers. That gentleman over there, for instance, with the crêpe band on his sleeve—he's been coming here for a long time. We know all about him."
I followed the direction of her eyes, and saw a tall, good-looking, blondish man, extremely well dressed, and having the air of wealth and breeding. Though his hair was neither long nor curly, there was a gentle melancholy about his large eyes that made him look as if he might be a poet, and his serious manner, as he selected some delicately tinted purple orchids, and carefully tried different shades of ribbon with them, showed that he valued rightly the power of little things.
"And what about him?" I asked, sniffing about among the roses and carnations on the counter.
"Well," said the girl, "I began to notice him about two years ago. At first he used to come about once a week and order flowers, and, of course, after a while we noticed that they were always sent to the same address—'Miss Alice Lemar.' He gradually began coming oftener and oftener, until we knew that he was good for an order every day. One afternoon he came in with a girl—one of those laughy, bright, motiony girls that I would love, too, if I were a man—and she had on the loveliest clothes you ever saw; and when he said, 'Now, Miss Alice, we must get you the very prettiest flowers they have,' we girls looked at each other with that look which takes the place of a wink when winking is out of the question, and which meant, in that case, 'Here she is at last,' or, 'Now we know what she looks like.' She was so nice and talky, and not a bit stuck up. Before she left she had said something natural and human to every one of us—not patronizingly, you know; oh! you know how—just as if it never could occur to her that we weren't people to be talked to brightly and nicely. After that the flowers she got were every one picked specimens of perfection, and when one day an order came for a big bouquet of white rosebuds and white violets and a spray of orange blossoms, to be tied with white ribbon and sent to Miss Alice Lemar, you may be sure that we all had a hand in preparing it. Really, it was the handsomest bouquet that ever went out from this shop, and it went with the honest good wishes of every one of us.
"After they were married, he didn't drop off in his attentions the way lots of men do; he kept on giving her just as many flowers, if not more, only now they were addressed to 'Mrs. Harold Harrison.' That kept up for about a year, when one day he came in, looking anxious but happy, and ordered a great bunch of full-blown American Beauties to be sent to his wife—I was waiting on him, and I had the address written before he spoke it—and then he selected some of those tiny little cluster rosebuds, pink ones, and said, looking alittle sheepish, 'Please send those to Master Harold Harrison, Junior,
