“Very well,” I said, with a show of spunk, “give me one single task, that I may not feel as if I had no part in the homemaking.  Something as ornamental and frivolous as you choose, but that shall occupy me at least two hours a day!”

Maria paused a moment; we were then standing in front of the fireplace, where a jar of bayberry filled the place of logs between the andirons.  First, casting her eyes through the doors of dining room, living room, and den, she fixed them on me with rather a mischievous twinkle, as she said, “You shall gather and arrange the flowers for the house; and always have plenty of them, but never a withered or dropsical blossom among them all.  You shall also invent new ways for arranging them, new combinations, new effects, the only restriction being that you shall not put vases where the water will drip on books, or make the house look like the show window of a wholesale florist.  I will give you a fresh mop, and you can have the back porch and table for your workshop, and if I’m not mistaken, you will find two hours a day little enough for the work!” she added with very much the air of some one engaging a new housemaid and presenting her with a broom!

It has never taken me two hours to gather and arrange the flowers, and though of course we are only beginning to have much of a garden, we’ve always had flowers in the house,—­quantities of sweet peas and such things, besides wild flowers.  I began to protest, an injured feeling rising in my throat, that she, Maria Maxwell, music teacher, city bound for ten years, should think to instruct me of recent outdoor experience.

“Yes, you’ve always had flowers, but did you pick the sweet peas or did Barney?  Did you cram them haphazard into the first thing that came handy (probably that awful bowl decorated in ten discordant colours and evidently a wedding present, for such atrocities never find any other medium of circulation)?  Or did you separate them nicely, and arrange the pink and salmon peas with the lavender in that plain-coloured Sevres vase that is unusually accommodating in the matter of water, then putting the gay colours in the blue-and-white Delft bowl and the duller ones in cut glass to give them life?  Having plenty, did you change them every other day, or the moment the water began to look milky, or did you leave them until the flowers clung together in the first stages of mould?  Meanwhile, the ungathered flowers on the vines were seriously developing peas and shortening their stems to be better able to bear their weight.  And, Mary Penrose,”—­here Maria positively glared at me as if I had been a primary pupil in the most undesirable school of her route who was both stone deaf and afflicted with catarrh, “did you wash out your jars and vases with a mop every time you changed the flowers, and wipe them on a towel separate from the ones used for the pantry glass?  No, you never did!  You tipped the water out over there at the end of the piazza by the honeysuckles, because you couldn’t quite bring yourself to pouring it down the pantry sink, refilled the vases, and that was all!”