“You?—why that doesn’t matter, because you don’t matter. You’re a sterile old stick. Sterility has no vote. You’ll just rub along, getting through the days, till the end. You’ve had your chance and lost it.” “You don’t give me much encouragement,” I complained. “Why should I?” she replied. “The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do. But you might marry yet?” “Never,” I said. “Very well then, you must rust and bear it.” Cold comfort indeed! * * * * * If ever there were two people on this planet who might have been let alone, and wanted to be let alone, and deserved to be let alone, they were Rose and I. But it was not to be. While with the Strattons, at some “At Home,” Rose had met a Mrs. Lovell, who was about to go into business as a florist, and she had offered Rose a post. It was to be a florist’s of a new kind, for not only were flowers to be sold but they were to be arranged too. The staff was to include flower-arrangers who on the evenings of dinner-parties would go out to decorate the tables. Premises had been taken, just off the Brompton Road, and already a connection was being formed. If Mrs. Lovell still had room for her, said Rose, she would go. It was not what she had dreamed of, but it was something definite, a start. “There is so little for an untrained girl to do,” she said. “It isn’t as if I was brought up to have to earn my own living. I’m going to be fairly well off, aren’t I?” “Fairly,” I said, “when you’re twenty.” “There you are!” she said. “But at the moment, if I have to go, I should like to try to be independent. And of course, I have to go,” she added: “it was cowardly to say ‘if.’ I can’t teach: I don’t know anything. I can’t type or do shorthand. I don’t want to be a companion to an old lady—unless it were to Mrs. O’Gorman; but she’s got Julia. But I like being among flowers, even though they’re cut, and I like Mrs. Lovell, and I think that’s a Heaven-sent opening. Almost no one arranges flowers as a profession now. The only one I’ve heard of is a little Japanese man. So we shall have the field to ourselves. It’s fun to be doing something original.” And soon afterwards she went. Of this part of Rose’s life I have little to say. I can tell only what I know at first hand. Whenever I was in London—but that was very seldom—I called at the florist’s; and Rose came down for Sundays now and then. She seemed to be happy and uncomplicated. Whether her association with me—whether my general tutelary influence in her earlier years—was being of any use to her I had no means of judging. She might have been equally capable without it. Educationalists never know.