"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.
"When we were in Japan Dorothy and I learned something about the Japanese notions of flower arrangement," continued Mrs. Smith. "They usually use one very beautiful dominating blossom. If others are added they are not competing for first place but they act as helpers to add to the beauty of the main attraction."
"We've learned some of the Japanese ways," said Mrs. Emerson. "I remember when people always made a bouquet perfectly round and of as many kinds of flowers as they could put into it."
"People don't make 'bouquets' now; they gather a 'bunch of flowers,' or they give you a single bloom," smiled her daughter. "But isn't it true that we get as much pleasure out of a single superb chrysanthemum or rose as we do out of a great mass of them?"
"There are times when I like masses," admitted Mrs. Emerson. "I like flowers of many kinds if the colors are harmoniously arranged, and I like a mantelpiece banked with the kind of flowers that give you pleasure when you see them in masses in the garden or the greenhouse."