XXXI 



THR really artistic member of the famiglia is Juvenal. 

 He settles all the flowers/ and for that alone for the 

 pleasure he gets from it and the pleasure he gives- 

 he is worth his weight in gold. The little gold and< 

 mother-of-pearl tinted Italian drawing-room is always 

 a bower. Yesterday, on the silver table which stands 

 beneath a silver and gold Ikon, he set a vase of white 

 and yellow Roses. It was a touch of genius ! We 

 are quite sick of reading how beautiful Primroses 

 look in Benares brass bowls. Personally, we dislike 

 brass bowls for flowers. Glass ! Glass ! There is 

 nothing as good as glass, especially when you have 

 the luck to possess, as we did, a case of old Dutch 

 moulded bottles. They were made in all kinds of delicious 

 angles three-cornered, square, hexagonal with Tulips 

 stamped in the glass : in such as these a couple of long- 

 stemmed Roses or Irises, and especially Tulips and Daffo- 

 dils, are at their very best. 



We have said " they were. 77 Alas for those Dutch bottles, 

 and for our folly, improvident wretches as we are, in 

 setting them about for our own pleasure, instead of shut- 

 ting them up in a cabinet ! Of what were once eleven 

 perfect irreplaceable treasures <the twelfth had a large chip 

 off its neck from the beginning), there are only five left ! 

 Tittums, the splendid savage " smoke Persian, 77 swept the 

 biggest and best off a chimney-piece with taps of a 

 deliberately evil paw. . . . And the rest have gone the way 

 of vases ! 



" Very sorry, Miss 77 <it 7 s generally to the Signorina they 



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