Mary

Little girls have a natural desire to gather flowers and stars. But stars won't let themselves be picked and so seem to teach little girls that in this world there are some desires that are destined never to be satisfied. Miss Mary went out in the park, where she discovered a basket of hortensias. She knew that the flowers of hortensias are pretty, and so she picked one. It was very hard to pick too. She seized the plant in both hands, at great risk of sitting down hard when the stem broke. She was very pleased and proud at what she'd done. But her nurse saw her: and scolded and darted at Miss Mary, seizing her by the arm. To make her do penance she did not put her in the dark closet this time, but posted her underneath a great chestnut tree, in the shade of a big Japanese umbrella.  There Miss Mary sits, surprised and astonished, and thinks it all over. Her flower in her hand, with the stripes of the umbrella making rays around her, she looked like some queer little foreign idol.   Her nurse said: "Mary, I forbid you to carry that flower in your mouth. If you disobey me your little dog Toto will eat your ears up for you" with which warning she departed. The little penitent, perfectly still beneath her shining frame, looks around her at the sky and the earth. They are large, the earth and sky, and can amuse a little girl for a while. But the hortensia flower interests her more than anything. She reflects: "A flower should smell good." And she raises nearer to her nose the beautiful rosy, blue tempered ball. She tries to smell it but can smell nothing. She is not clever at smelling perfumes. Not so very, very long ago she used to breathe over the roses instead of sniffing them in. We must not laugh at her for that: one can't learn everything at once. Besides, she might have had, like her mother, a very subtle sense of smell that could smell nothing. The flower of the hortensia has no odor. That is why one grows tired of it, in spite of its beauty. But Miss Mary thinks: "This flower is made of sugar, maybe." With that she opens her mouth wide, and starts to raise the flower to her lips.  A cry recalls her. Yap! It is the little dog Toto, who, darting round a border of geraniums, comes and sets himself, his ears straight up, before Miss Mary and looks at her warningly with his round bright eyes.