“I must say, I don’t think these look pretty a bit,” confessed Dorothy, gazing with her head on one side at a large bowl of flowers of all colors that she had placed in the middle of one of the tables.

Her mother looked at it and smiled.

“Don’t try to show off your whole stock at once,” she advised.  “Have a few arranged in the way that shows them to the best advantage and let Ethel Blue draw a poster stating that there are plenty more behind the scenes.  Have your supply at the back or under the table in large jars and bowls and replenish your vases as soon as you sell their contents.”

The Ethels and Dorothy thought this was a sensible way of doing things and said so, and Ethel Blue at once set about the preparation of three posters drawn on brown wrapping paper and showing a girl holding a flower and saying “We have plenty more like this.  Ask for them.”  They proved to be very pretty and were put up in the hall and the outside enclosure and on the lawn.

“There are certain kinds of flowers that should always be kept low,” explained Mrs. Smith as they all sorted over the cut flowers that had been contributed.  “Flowers that grow directly from the ground like crocuses or jonquils or daffodils or narcissus—­the spring bulbs—­should be set into flat bowls through netting that will hold them upright.  There are bowls sold for this purpose.”

“Don’t they call them ’pansy bowls’?”

“I have heard them called that.  Some of them have a pierced china top; others have a silver netting.  You can make a top for a bowl of any size by cutting chicken wire to suit your needs.”

“I should think a low-growing plant like ageratum would be pretty in a vase of that sort.”

“It would, and pansies, of course, and anemones—­windflowers—­held upright by very fine netting and nodding in every current of air as if they were still in the woods.”

“I think I’ll make a covering for a glass bowl we have at home,” declared Ethel Brown, who was diligently snipping ends of stems as she listened.

“A glass bowl doesn’t seem to me suitable,” answered her aunt.  “Can you guess why?”

Ethel Brown shook her head with a murmured “No.”  It was Della who offered an explanation.

“The stems aren’t pretty enough to look at,” she suggested.  “When you use a glass bowl or vase the stems you see through it ought to be graceful.”

“I think so,” responded Mrs. Smith.  “That’s why we always take pleasure in a tall slender glass vase holding a single rose with a long stem still bearing a few leaves.  We get the effect that it gives us out of doors.”

“That’s what we like to see,” agreed Mrs. Morton.  “Narcissus springing from a low bowl is an application of the same idea.  So are these few sprays of clematis waving from a vase made to hang on the wall.  They aren’t crowded; they fall easily; they look happy.”

“And in a room you would select a vase that would harmonize with the coloring,” added Margaret, who was mixing sweetpeas in loose bunches with feathery gypsophila.