"
"Well, he didn't just mention it," said Donald, "but I can
.easily see how it might have been."
After they had finished one of Katy's inspired lunches, in which
a large part of the inspiration had been mental on Linda's part
and executive on Katy's, they climbed rock faces, skirted
wave-beaten promontories, and stood peering from overhanging
cliffs dipping down into the fathomless green sea, where the
water boiled up in turbulent fury. Linda pointed out the rocks
upon which she would sit, if she were a mermaid, to comb the
seaweed from her hair. She could hear the sea bells ringing in
those menacing depths, but Donald's ears were not so finely
tuned. At the top of one of the highest cliffs they climbed,
there grew a clump of slender pale green bushes, towering high
above their heads with exquisitely cut blue-green leaves, lance
shaped and slender. Donald looked at the fascinating growth
appraisingly.
"Linda," he said, "do you know that the slimness and the
sheerness and the audacious foothold and the beauty of that thing
remind me of you? It is covered all over with the delicate
frostbloom you taught me to see upon fruit. I find it everywhere
but you have never told me what it is."
Linda laughingly reached up and broke a spray of greenish-yellow
tubular flowers, curving out like clustered trumpets spilling
melody from their fluted throats.
"You will see it everywhere. You will find these flowers every
month of the year," she said, "and I am particularly gladsome
that this plant reminds you of me.
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