her sleeves and wrists:  “Ah, that’s lilac!” And at her neck, and her cheeks and lips:  “Ah, but that’s roses!” he would cry.  Cadine used to laugh at him, and call him a “silly stupid,” and tell him to get away, because he was tickling her with the tip of his nose.  As she spoke her breath smelt of jasmine.  She was verily a bouquet, full of warmth and life.

She now got up at four o’clock every morning to assist her mistress in her purchases.  Each day they bought armfuls of flowers from the suburban florists, with bundles of moss, and bundles of fern fronds, and periwinkle leaves to garnish the bouquets.  Cadine would gaze with amazement at the diamonds and Valenciennes worn by the daughters of the great gardeners of Montreuil, who came to the markets amidst their roses.

On the saints’ days of popular observance, such as Saint Mary’s, Saint Peter’s, and Saint Joseph’s days, the sale of flowers began at two o’clock.  More than a hundred thousand francs’ worth of cut flowers would be sold on the footways, and some of the retail dealers would make as much as two hundred francs in a few hours.  On days like those only Cadine’s curly locks peered over the mounds of pansies, mignonette, and marguerites.  She was quite drowned and lost in the flood of flowers.  Then she would spend all her time in mounting bouquets on bits of rush.  In a few weeks she acquired considerable skillfulness in her business, and manifested no little originality.  Her bouquets did not always please everybody, however.  Sometimes they made one smile, sometimes they alarmed the eyes.  Red predominated in them, mottled with violent tints of blue, yellow, and violet of a barbaric charm.  On the mornings when she pinched Marjolin, and teased him till she made him cry, she made up fierce-looking bouquets, suggestive of her own bad temper, bouquets with strong rough scents and glaring irritating colours.  On other days, however, when she was softened by some thrill of joy or sorrow, her bouquets would assume a tone of silvery grey, very soft and subdued, and delicately perfumed.

Then, too, she would set roses, as sanguineous as open hearts, in lakes of snow-white pinks; arrange bunches of tawny iris that shot up in tufts of flame from foliage that seemed scared by the brilliance of the flowers; work elaborate designs, as complicated as those of Smyrna rugs, adding flower to flower, as on a canvas; and prepare rippling fanlike bouquets spreading out with all the delicacy of lace.  Here was a cluster of flowers of delicious purity, there a fat nosegay, whatever one might dream of for the hand of a marchioness or a fish-wife; all the charming quaint fancies, in short, which the brain of a sharp-witted child of twelve, budding into womanhood, could devise.