He asked me if I would go with him for a drive and I told
him that I would. I am rather stunned yet over what happened.
The runabout he led me to was greatly like yours, and, Linda, he
stopped at a florist's and came out with an armload of
bloom--exquisite lavender and pale pink and faint yellow and
waxen white--the most enticing armload of spring. For one minute
I truly experienced a thrill. I thought he was going to give
that mass of flowers to me, but he did not. He merely laid it
across my lap and said: "Edith adored the flowers from bulbs. I
never see such bloom that my heart does not ache with a keen,
angry ache to think that she should be taken from the world, and
the beauty that she so loved, so early and so ruthlessly. We'll
take her these as I would take them to her were she living."
So, Linda dear, I sat there and looked at color and drank in
fragrance, and we whirled through the city and away to a cemetery
on a beautiful hill, and filled a vase inside the gates of a
mausoleum with these appealing flowers. Then we sat down, and a
man with a hurt heart told me about his hurt, and what an effort
he was making to get through the world as the woman he loved
would have had him; and before I knew what I was doing, Linda, I
told him the tellable part of my own hurts. I even lifted my
turban and bowed my white head before him. This hurt--it was one
of the inexorable things that come to people in this world--I
could talk about.
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