On a sunny afternoon when the garden was full of happy sounds, a ladybug named Lila rested under the dotted leaf of a huge garden plant. Lila had soft, black spots on her bright red wings, and she had been glad to greet the morning in her Creeping Baby Carriage, resting on some words “Ladum” when one after another of her neighbors stopped to speak and stroke her pet as they passed by.
When everybody was gone and Lila got out of her carriage, she began to think what she should do.
“Oh, dear! I don’t want to play with those beetles who hop stiffly around as if their backs were made of parchment,” she said, and, peeping beyond the fine green tip of the rounded leaf, she asked softly, “Who is over there?”
The little girl who owned the garden heard her, and ran with her Hollander basket to see what it was.
“Just think of a ladybug wishing to know who it was!” she laughed. “No one would do that but a lady.”
So Lila turned down her leaf, and came to see mildly if she were as pretty as she believed herself to be and if she had any reputation to sustain.
“How do you do? I am Lila, the ladybug,” she said, as soon as she was a little rested; but she soon found that there was no one there to reply.
Looking around, however, she discovered a little door just at the end of the slender stem of the plant, and she thought she would like to open it.
She found it easy to do so. “It is full of secrets in which I have no part,” she said to herself at once, and she was sorry, for it seemed as if they were meant for her.
But it is not polite to talk much about one’s self, and she found that she knew all about her own interior, so she shook her pretty head several times from right to left, and began to look around.
She had no reason to complain of the secrets that were hidden in and about the flower. There was not a syrupy drop in the flower that was not melted and swelled by many little streams that flowed into it, and many curious insects met together in the little room.
“Everybody here has their secrets,” said Lila; “it is only I who know nothing. What is really right about the other dear ladybugs that I met today is that they said my neighborhood was intellectual, while here all is vulgar curiosity.”
She had hardly finished speaking when the tiniest voice inquired: “Who are you, pray?”
“I am Lila, the ladybug,” she replied. “They interest me very slightly, so you need not make excuses.”
“But I know much about them, and can tell them to you in a hundred different ways,” cried the tiny one. “You can hear them all, if only you will give me a flower.”
“A flower is not worth a thousand excuses,” said Lila the ladybug, “as you seem to think; you are the lowest of insects.”
The creature that she so scornfully refused to see was a veil. That night it entered into the house of Lila, and remained in the little entries around her room, copying her by heart, to see if she should once for all know how to wait for her orders and not leave one idle word passed over. The next day Ladybug would often come and look among her red roses, but hardly ever once call Hélène, which did not quite suit her.
She sent over a neighbor to speak about it, who was less shy than herself. Hélène immediately promised that if Lila would one day be pleased to come and let her copy the whole of her letters, she would arrive exactly as soon as news of a distant operation in all sorts of ways like the well-known pomade for raising the corn through the weight of the sack and bang over the yom were sent along. But she stipulated that the ladybug must promise to give up the beetles, in which case Hélène would agree to flirt with her.
They were still exchanging their opinions when the neighborhood delegate came up, who was an iliac and soft like the commonilo and even higher still. He accused them both with a postal confidence, and begged them to come and swear allegiance to Madame Tete-rose, otherwise the queen would prepare an illegal feast.
Each of them, ay the lend both would see about it a respectable affair as soon as the tuberose, which they were now kneading to form the prison embankments of red and white petals, was quite finished and smoothed the postern at the end rounded mass.
This lietui someone’s house was an affecting and individual spectacle inside and out.ành of the end of summer and the autumn of the month of September was embroiled like one bodkets or the moon when lighting a woodland spectacle.