“It’s of no consequence,” she said, with an air of kindly tolerance for my shortcomings. “I’m perfectly happy here under the blue dome of heaven.” My other guests seemed to have had enough of her already, and were making their way towards the house, as it was nearly time to start the meeting; but Virginia linked her arm in that of the V.A.D., and followed close at my heels; for her, the lady promised to be interesting. “Oh, what adorable kroki!” the newcomer went on, without any break, apostrophising a few late crocuses that were already looking jaded. “And those daisies! I do so _love_ daisies, don’t you? ‘Wee modest crimson-tipped flowers’—you remember the poet’s allusion, of course? So appropriate.” The flowers she was pointing at with her knotty walking-stick were particularly large, buxom-looking red double daisies, a prize variety, that not even the imagination of a poet could have described as “wee”! “It’s wonderful how literature opens one’s eyes to the beauties of nature. I always say ‘Read the poets,’ then it will not matter whether you stay in town or country, nature will be an open book to you.” (Undoubtedly the Literary Lady had arrived; and she was bent either on improving or on impressing us!) “The poets take you into the very _heart_ of things. ‘A primrose by a river’s brim’; where can you find a truer picture of the simple wayside flower? And isn’t that an exquisite line, ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’? I entirely agree with Shakespeare in this” (which was nice of her!); “it is just as I was saying, it really doesn’t matter whether you know a single flower individually—or whether you have ever seen a flower, in fact—all nature can be yours. I consider it criminal to neglect the poets. Wherever the eye wanders,” she went on, “it recalls some great truth that has been crystallised for us by literary men” (evidently the flowers themselves were of small count; all that mattered was what pen-and-ink could make out of them). “And Ladysmocks all silver white.” It was evident that she was warming to the work and going farther afield, for here the stick took a dangerous sweep round in mid-air (Virginia saved her head by dodging it), and was now pointing into the copse the other side of the garden-wall, where the anemones were still in bloom. “I simply revel in Lady’s Smocks, don’t you?” she said ardently to Virginia, and then smiled expansively into the copse, though there wasn’t a solitary Lady’s Smock there. “For my own part, I must say I prefer Doxies,” said Virginia sweetly. “‘The Doxy over the dale,’ as Shakespeare so beautifully expresses it. Don’t you just _love_ them?” The V.A.D. had turned her back on us and was studying the distant hills. “Virginia,” I interpolated hurriedly, for I scented trouble immediately ahead, “isn’t that the Rector coming up the lane? Then we must be getting indoors.”