He used the word "seemed" in his inmost musings, for it was
never quite certain what really did please and displease her.
It was always puzzling to him to reconcile her undoubted
intellectual activity with the practical emptiness of
the existence she professed to enjoy. In one direction,
she had indeed a genuine outlet for her energies,
which he could understand her regarding in the light of
an occupation. She was crazier about flowers and plants
than anybody he had ever heard of, and it had delighted
him to make over to her, labelled jocosely as the
bouquet-fund, a sum of money which, it seemed to him,
might have paid for the hanging-gardens of Babylon.
It yielded in time--emerging slowly but steadily from
a prodigious litter of cement and bricks and mortar
and putty, under the hands of innumerable masons,
carpenters, glaziers, plumbers, and nondescript subordinates,
all of whom talked unwearyingly about nothing at all,
and suffered no man to perform any part of his allotted
task without suspending their own labours to watch
him--an imposing long line of new greenhouses, more than
twenty in number. The mail-bag was filled meanwhile
with nurserymen's catalogues, and the cart made incessant
journeys to and from Punsey station, bringing back vast
straw-enwrapped baskets and bundles and boxes beyond counting,
the arrival and unpacking of which was with Edith the event
of the day.
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