t on
impossible soups and stews and sandwiches in a restaurant across the
way. The only alternative is to bring my lunch in a box, and eat it on
my desk. And then I lose the breath of fresh air which I need more
than the food.

Oh, these June days! Are they hot with you? Here they are heavenly.
When the windows are open, the sweet warm air blows up from the river
and across the White Lot, and we get a whiff of roses from the gardens
back of the President's house; and when I reach home at night, the
fragrance of the roses in our own garden meets me long before I can see
the house. We have wonderful roses this year, and the hundred-leaved
bush back of the bench by the fountain is like a rosy cloud. I made a
crown of them the other day, and put them on the head of the little
bronze boy, and I took a picture which I am sending. Somehow the boy
of the fountain has always seemed to me to be alive, and to have in him
some human quality, like a faun or a dryad.

Last night I sat very late in the garden, and I thought of what you
said to me that night when you tried to tell me about your life. Do
you remember what you said--that when I came into it, it seemed to you
that the garden bloomed? Well, I came across this the other day, in a
volume of Ruskin which father gave me, and which somehow I've never
cared to read--but now it seems quite wonderful:

"You have heard it said that flowers flourish rightly only in the
garden of some one who loves them. I know you would like that to be
true; you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your
flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them; if you could bid
the dew fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, 'Come
thou south wind and breathe upon my garden that the spices of it may
flow forth.' This you would think a great thing. And do you not think
it a greater thing that all this you can do for fairer flowers than
these--flowers that have eyes like yours and thoughts like yours, and
lives like yours; which, once saved, you save forever.

"Will you not go down among them--far among the moorlands and the
rocks--far in the darkness of the terrible streets; these feeble
florets are lying with all their fresh leaves torn and their stems
broken--will you never go down to them, not set them in order in their
little fragrant beds, nor fence them in their shuddering from the
fierce wind?"

There's a lot more of it--but perhaps you know it. I t