The marigolds were frost-nipped and one lonely
black-winged butterfly was vainly searching them one by one for
the lost sweets of summer. The gorgeous crowns of the sun-flowers
were nothing but grotesque black mummy-heads set on lean, dead
bodies, and the clump of big castor-plants, buffeted by the wind,
leaned this way and that like giants in a drunken orgy trying to
keep one another from falling down. The blight that was on the
garden was the blight that was in her heart, and two bits of cheer
only she found--one yellow nasturtium, scarlet-flecked, whose
fragrance was a memory of the spring that was long gone, and one
little cedar tree that had caught some dead leaves in its green
arms and was firmly holding them as though to promise that another
spring would surely come. With the flower in her hand, she started
up the ravine to her dreaming place, but it was so lonely up there
and she turned back. She went into her room and tried to read.
Mechanically, she half opened the lid of the piano and shut it,
horrified by her own act. As she passed out on the porch again she
noticed that it was only nine o'clock.
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