But Ellen was speaking now, apologising because she had made him eat by candlelight, offering to light the gas, explaining that she and her mother had burned candles all the week because they hurt his roses less.  “But surely,” he said, “these roses can’t be the ones I sent you?  That was five days ago.  These look quite fresh.”  Her face became vivacious and passionate; she came to the table and bent over the vases with an excitement that would have struck most people as a little mad.  “Of course these are your roses!” she exclaimed.  “Five days indeed!  They’ll keep a fortnight the way mother and I do them.  When they begin to droop you plunge the stalks into boiling water....”

He watched her with quiet delight.  In the course of his life he had given flowers to several women, but none of them had ever plunged their stalks into boiling water.  Instead they had stood up very straight in their shiny gowns and lifted the flowers in a pretence of inhaling the fragrance which the strong scent they used must certainly have prevented them from smelling, and had sent out from their little mouths fluttering murmurs of gratitude that were somehow not references to the flowers at all, but declarations of femaleness.  Surely both the woman who performed that conventional gesture and the man who witnessed it were very pathetic.  It was as if the man brought the flowers as a symbol of the wonderful gifts he might have given her if they had been real lovers, and as if the woman answered by those female murmurings that if they had been real lovers she would have repaid him with such miracles of tenderness.  The gesture was always followed, he remembered, by a period of silence when she laid the flowers aside for some servant’s attention, which was surely a moment of flat ironic regret.

But the roses that he had brought Ellen were no symbol but a real gift.  They satisfied one of her starvations.  She was leaning over them wolfishly, and presently straightened herself and stared at a dark wall and told how early one spring she had gone to a Primrose League picnic ("Mother brought me up as a Consairvative.  It’s been a great grief to her the way I’ve gone”) at Melville Castle.  There had been lilac and laburnums.  Lilac and laburnums!  She had evidently been transported by those delicate mauve and yellow silk embroideries on the grey canvas of the Scottish countryside, and his roses had taken her the same journey into ecstasy, just as the fact of her had brought him back into the happiness away from which he had been travelling for years.  They had a magical power to give each other the things they wanted.

But she was uneasy.  The clock had struck seven, and she had seemed perturbed by its striking.  “Do you want me to go?” he asked, with the frank bad manners of a man who is making love in a hurry.

“Och, no!” she answered reluctantly, “but there’s the shopping.”

“Can’t I come and carry the things for you?”