"
Bebee threw them with a shudder on the grass.
"Have I spoilt your holiday, dear?" he said, with a certain
self-reproach.
She was silent a minute, then she gathered up the daisies again, and
stroked them and put them to her lips.
"It is not they that do wrong. You say the girls' ears deceive them. It
is the girls who want a lie and will not believe a truth because it
humbles them; it is the girls that are to blame, not the daisies. As for
me, I will not ask the daisies anything ever, so the fiend will not enter
into them."
"Nor into you. Poor little Bebee!"
"Why, you pity me for that?"
"Yes. Because, if women never see the serpent's face, neither do they
ever scent the smell of the paradise roses; and it will be hard for you
to die without a single rose d'amour in your pretty breast, poor little
Bebee?"
"I do not understand. But you frighten me a little."
He rose and left his easel and threw himself at her feet on the grass; he
took the little wooden shoes in his hands as reverently as he would have
taken the broidered shoes of a duchess; he looked up at her with tender,
smiling eyes.
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