One sunny spring day, I was having a nice rest after my breakfast in a strange, treated little garden which I found out some weeks before.
“This is a quite a Club, this,” I said to myself. I forget everything, my troubles, my before-time thoughts, and I became more interested in this Club, which was turned into a flower garden, that surrounded the house that I did not know because it did when I came, and I know all the gardens in London.
I was wishing that a few friends of mine would find it out. I had quite a long list of names written over my heart with my clever little tongue; but just as I was thinking this and thinking that, who should come to the front door but my cousin and aunt.
Now I am sorry to say I had an aunt, and that my aunt had a cousin. Still more, I am sorry to say my aunt, I mean the aunt I go to see, thought it was the best thing possible because if she had not had it to read she would have had to read the Electric Current, or the Railway Times, or some other useful books.
So I had to study her cousin’s cousin, which went on from my great great-grandfather down to my grandfather’s uncle’s aunt’s nephew, and my grandfather name row on row over all those shaded pieces of paper till I forgot all about the Club, and when I came to myself found that I had lost all the accounts, to say nothing of my own relatives, twice over.
While she read it I sat by my husband to cry from weariness.
“I think,” he said when she had come to the end, “I think one would have been grieved enough over the relatives without having them from the poetical classades over my aunt Little Maud. Still I admire the author and the work. It was even more interesting than the Electric Current, if that is not to be frowned on. Thanks very much, it was all taking for the time, though my cousin would not understand the work of the poet. A title must mean more than the word only.”
The next morning Maud came to me, and she and I had tea in the arbour.
“Life,” she said, “is not like fiction. There are real friends. There is real life. Ah!” So saying, the touch of her hand led me to the decision that I and she should be married.
It is most important that we should be companions and helpmates.
“Do you care very much,” I said, “for the red geranium?”
“Geranium,” she answered.
“Then,” I said, “I will not take it away.”
We stood an instant in silence, with our arms around one another and our eyes looking at one another contentedly.
“Now,” I said, “I think I will plant more red flowers– a click in my heart to be inserted directly. What have you been doing?”
“I hope to gather a bouquet in a few days,” she said.
“This should bring a smile to the couch of any poor Lizer.”
“I think sentiments do,” Lizer said earnestly.
I told her, then, of my secret club; and she thought as I did that it would give the little relatives an idea to join.
“I love the little creatures,” she said, smiling.
That night, as I was walking to his station, my mind not too awake, I came on a biped which I had never met before before.
“Good evening,” he said when I approached. I turned round to survey him. His voice and appearance led me to think him most people-like, still his head seemed almost entirely made of black wood, or some such material; the “thinked” part which did not glitter gave the idea of several blue plateaux almost connected.
“This must be the cousin who is coming for a week or so,” I said to myself; but he still seemed so uneasy at something that I could hear he had nothing much wrong inside, and nothing to speak to.
When I told Maud of this checking meeting the next day, she thought this cousin could do much more then she could, understood and help an idea like mine.
“Of course he will do nothing for it,” she said, “but he may improve it by accident.”