,
and which were not easy to dispel.

He caught sight at last of Rosie's dull-green frock in the one hothouse
in which there were flowers. Through the glass roof he could see the red
disks of poinsettias and the crimson or white of azaleas coming into
bloom. The other two houses sheltered long, level rectangles of tender
green, representing lettuce in different stages of the crop. A
bow-legged Italian was closing the skylights that had been opened for
the milder part of the day; another Italian replaced the covers on
hot-beds that might have contained violets. From the high furnace
chimney a plume of yellow-brown smoke floated heavily on the windless
air. The place looked undermanned and forlorn.

On opening the door he was met by the sweet, warm odor of damp earth and
green things growing and blossoming. Pausing in her work, the girl
looked down the half-length of the greenhouse as a hint for him to
advance. He went toward her between feathery banks of gray-green
carnations, on which the long, oval, compact buds were loosening their
sheaths to display the dawn-pink within. Half covered up by a coarse
apron or pinafore, she stood at a high table, like a counter, against a
background of poinsettias.

"We don't go in for flowers, really," she explained to him, after he had
given her certain directions concerning her mother. "It would be better
if we didn't try to raise them at all."

Thor, whose ear was sensitive, noticed that her voice was pleasant to
listen to, and her speech marked by a simple, unaffected refinement. He
lingered because he was interested in her work. He found a kind of
fascination in watching her as she took a moist red flower-pot from one
end of the table, threw in a handful or two of earth from the heap at
the other end, then a root that looked like a cluster of yellow,
crescent-shaped onions, then a little more earth, after which she turned
to place the flower-pot as one of the row on the floor behind her. There
was something rhythmic in her movements. Each detail took the same
amount of action and time. She might have been working to music. Her
left hand made precisely the same gesture with each flower-pot she took
from the line in which they lay telescoped together. Her right hand
described the same graceful curve with every impatient, petulant handful
of earth.

"Why do you raise them, then?" he asked, for the sake of saying
something.

She answered, wearily: "Oh, it's father. He can't ma