In a mason jar on the mantel, next to a hit-or-miss row of Russian novels, Havelock Ellis's _Sex in Relation to Society, Freud on Dreams and Psychanalysis_, and two volumes of Schnitzler's plays, blazed a large cluster of jonquils. At the other end of the mantel, drooping over the rim of a green water pitcher, were dusty yellow roses, full blown, half their petals scattered on books, mantel and hearth, their scent heavy in his nostrils. A tin wash basin, on the mission table by the wall, was packed, smothered, with pansies--buff, yellow, orange, purple, velvet black. A bunch of violets surmounted an old sugar bowl that shared with cigarette boxes, matches and an ash receiver, the tabouret by the couch-bed. But what widened the Worm's faint smile into a forthright grin, square and huge on the table, towering over the pansies, was a newly opened five-pound box of sweets. Sue came in, smiling herself, with a hint of the rueful, bearing before her a long parcel with square ends. “I'll bet it's roses,” observed the Worm. She tore off the paper, opened the box with quick fingers--it _was_ roses--deep red ones. She took a chocolate, nibbled it; then stepped back, laughing a little and threw out her hands. “Henry,” she cried, “what on earth am I to do with him! I've hinted. And I've begged. I'm afraid I'll hurt him--” “You would go and get engaged to him, Sue. And I must say he plays the rôle with all his might.” After which remark, the Worm produced, scraped, filled and lighted his pipe. “I'll start the water,” said Sue; then instead, stood gazing at the flowers. “It's so--Victorian!” The Worm grinned cheerfully. “Peter isn't so easy to classify as that.” “I know.” She reached for another chocolate. “He isn't Victorian.” “Not all the time, certainly. And not all over. Just in spots.” Her color deepened slightly. “You've never read the scenario he did for us, Henry. Nothing Victorian about that. There's a ring to it--and power. Nobody who misses the modern spirit _could_ have written it. Not possibly. It's the real battle cry of woman's freedom. And a blow for honesty! It is when I think of that--how the pictures are to be shown in every city and every village, all over this country--reaching people that the books never reach and touching their emotions, yes, their hearts where feminist speakers and such just antagonize them--” The sentence died out in mid-air. Sue, a flash in her deep-green eyes, stared out the window at the old red brick walls that surrounded the score of fenced-in little back yards, walls pierced with hundreds of other rear windows and burdened with cluttered fire-escapes, walls hidden here and there by high-hung lines of washing.