Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/269

 flowers that we throw to the oxen to eat, the very stones that are sweet with myrtle, the very sea sand that is musical with bees in the rosemary, everything we grow up amongst from infancy makes our love of Nature only a kind of unconscious joy in it—but here even the peasant has that, and the songs of the men that cannot read or write are full of it. If a field labourer sing to his love he will sing of the narcissus and the crocus, as Meleager sang to Heliodora twenty centuries ago"

"And your wild narcissus is the true narcissus; the Greek narcissus, with its many bells to one stem?"

"Yes. In March and April it will be out everywhere in the fields and woods about here. I thought once that you loved flowers as you loved art, merely as a decoration of your salon. But I was wrong. They are closer to your heart than that. Why do you deny your emotions? Why do you mask yourself under such cold phrases as those you used to me yesterday?"

She smiled a little.