But spring is not all of life, nor what at once chiefly concerns us. There are people to be noted: a little series of more or less related phenomena to be observed.
One of the people, a young man, stands conveniently before this same florist's window, at that hour when the sun briefly flushes this narrow canon of Broadway from wall to wall.
He had loitered along the lively highway an hour or more, his nerves tingling responsively to all its stimuli. And now he mused as he stared at the tangled tracery of ferns against the high bank of wine-red autumn foliage, the royal cluster of white chrysanthemums and the big jar of American Beauties.
He had looked forward to this moment, too--when he should enter that same door and order at least an armful of those same haughty roses sent to an address his memory cherished. Yet now, the time having come, the zest for the feat was gone. It would be done; it were ungraceful not to do it, after certain expressions; but it would be done with no heart because of the certain knowledge that no one--at least no one to be desired--could possibly care for him, or consider him even with interest for anything but his money--the same kind of money Higbee made by purveying hams--"and she wouldn't care in the least whether it was mine or Higbee's, so there was a lot of it."
Yet he stepped in and ordered the roses, nor did the florist once suspect that so lavish a buyer of flowers could be a prey to emotions of corroding cynicism toward the person for whom they were meant.
From the florist's he returned directly to the hotel to find his mother and Psyche making homelike the suite to which they had been assigned. A maid was unpacking trunks under his sister's supervision. Mrs. Bines was in converse with a person of authoritative manner regarding the service to be supplied them. Two maids would be required, and madame would of course wish a butler--
Mrs. Bines looked helplessly at her son who had just entered.
"I think--we've--we've always did our own buttling," she faltered.
"I'll attend to these things, ma," said Percival, rather suddenly. "Yes, we'll want a butler and the two maids, and see that the butler knows his business, please, and--here--take this, and see that we're properly looked after, will you?"