"On Sunday, Miss Renie, I like for my boys and girls from the factory to come up to my place and make themselves at home. You should see my old mother how she fixes for them! I wish you could see them boys and girls, and old men and women. In a sausage-factory they don't get much time to listen to birds and water when it falls into a fountain. I wish, Miss Renie, you could see them with the flowers. I--well, I don't know how to say it; but I wish you could see them for yourself." "They like it?" "Like it! I tell you it's the greatest pleasure I get out of my place. I wish, instead of my fine house, the city would let me build my factory for them right in the garden." "On such a stylish street they wouldn't ever let you, Mr. Hochenheimer." "Me and my mother ain't much for style, Miss Renie. Honest, you'd be surprised, but with my fine house I don't even keep an automobile. My mother, she's old, Miss Renie, and won't go in one. Alone it ain't no pleasure; and when I don't walk down to my factory the street-cars is good enough." "You should take it easier, Mr. Hochenheimer." "All our lives, Miss Renie, we've been so busy, my mother and me, I tell her we got to be learnt--like children got to be learnt to walk--how to enjoy ourselves. We--we need somebody young--somebody like you in the house, Miss Renie--young and so pretty, and full of life, and--and so sweet." She gave a gauzy laugh. "Honest, it must seem like a dream to have a rose-garden right on the place you live." "I wish you could see, Miss Renie, a new Killarney my gardener showed me in the hothouse yesterday before I left--white-and-pink blend; he got the clipping from Jamaica. It's a pale pink in the heart like the first minute when the sun rises; and then it gets pinker and pinker toward the outside petals, till it just bursts out as red as the sun when it's ready to set." "And those beautiful little tan roses you sent me, Mr. Hochenheimer; I--" "Ah, Miss Renie, the clipping from those sunset roses comes from Italy; but now I call them Renie Roses, if--if you'll excuse me. I tell you, Miss Renie, you look just enough like 'em to be related. Little satiny gold-looking roses, with a pink blush on the inside of the petals and a--a few little soft thorns on the stem." "Aw, Mr. Hochenheimer, I ain't got thorns." Out from the velvet shadows his face came closer. "It's thorns to me, Miss Renie, because you're so pretty and sweet, and--and seem so far away from a--plain fellow like me." "I--" "I'm a plain man, Miss Renie, and I don't know how to talk much about the things I feel inside of me; but--but I _feel_, all-righty." "Looks ain't everything." "I tell you, Miss Renie, now since I can afford it, I just don't seem to know how to do the things I got the feeling inside of me for. Even in my grand house sometimes I feel like it--it's too late for me to live like I feel." "Nothing's ever too late, Mr. Hochenheimer."