"He was perfectly welcome to whistle as he chose," she said, "and also to plow with the carriage horses, and to bedeck them and himself with the modest, shrinking red tulip and yellow daffodil." Now any one knows that tulips and daffodils are NOT modest and shrinking. If any flowers just blaze and scream colour clear across a garden, they do. She was provoked, you could see that. "Well, he only did it to please you," I said. "He didn't care anything about it. He never plowed that way before. But you said he mustn't plow at all, and he just had to plow, there was no escaping that, so he made it as fine and happy as possible to show you how nicely it could be done." "Greatly obliged, I'm sure!" cried the Princess. "He showed me! He certainly did! And so he feels that there's 'no escaping' plowing, does he?" Then I knew where I was. I'd have given every cent of mine in father's chest till, if mother had been in my place. Once, for a second, I thought I'd ask the Princess to go with me to the house, and let mother tell her how it was; but if she wouldn't go, and rode away, I felt I couldn't endure it, and anyway, she had said she was looking for me; so I gripped the shingle, dug in my toes and went at her just as nearly like mother talked to her father as I could remember, and I'd been put through memory tests, and descriptive tests, nearly every night of my life, so I had most of it as straight as a string. "Well, you see, he CAN'T escape it," I said. "He'd do anything in all this world for you that he possibly could; but there are some things no man CAN do." "I didn't suppose there was anything you thought Laddie couldn't do," she said. "A little time back, I didn't," I answered. "But since he took the carriage horses, trimmed up in flowers, and sang and whistled so bravely, day after day, when his heart was full of tears, why I learned that there was something he just COULDN'T DO; NOT TO SAVE HIS LIFE, OR HIS LOVE, OR EVEN TO SAVE YOU." "And of course you don't mind telling me what that is?" coaxed the Princess in her most wheedling tones. "Not at all! He told our family, and I heard him tell your father. The thing he can't do, not even to win you, is to be shut up in a little office, in a city, where things roar, and smell, and nothing is like this----" I pointed out the orchard, hill, and meadow, so she looked where I showed her--looked a long time. "No, a city wouldn't be like this," she said slowly.