Flowers O' May

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"Do you really think your mind has improved any?" asked Sara Ray seriously, wreathing the handle of her basket with creeping spruce.

"No, I'm afraid it hasn't one bit," answered Cecily sadly. "I feel that I haven't succeeded very well in keeping my resolutions."

"I've kept mine," said Felicity complacently.

"It's easy to keep just one," retorted Cecily, rather resentfully.

"It's not so easy to think beautiful thoughts," answered Felicity.

"It's the easiest thing in the world," said the Story Girl, tiptoeing to the edge of the pool to peep at her own arch reflection, as some nymph left over from the golden age might do. "Beautiful thoughts just crowd into your mind at times."

"Oh, yes, AT TIMES. But that's different from thinking one REGULARLY at a given hour. And mother is always calling up the stairs for me to hurry up and get dressed, and it's VERY hard sometimes."

"That's so," conceded the Story Girl. "There ARE times when I can't think anything but gray thoughts. Then, other days, I think pink and blue and gold and purple and rainbow thoughts all the time."

"The idea! As if thoughts were coloured," giggled Felicity.

"Oh, they are!" cried the Story Girl. "Why, I can always SEE the colour of any thought I think. Can't you?"

"I never heard of such a thing," declared Felicity, "and I don't believe it. I believe you are just making that up."

"Indeed I'm not. Why, I always supposed everyone thought in colours. It must be very tiresome if you don't."

"When you think of me what colour is it?" asked Peter curiously.

"Yellow," answered the Story Girl promptly. "And Cecily is a sweet pink, like those mayflowers, and Sara Ray is very pale blue, and Dan is red and Felix is yellow, like Peter, and Bev is striped."

"What colour am I?" asked Felicity, amid the laughter at my expense.

"You're--you're like a rainbow," answered the Story Girl rather reluctantly. She had to be honest, but she would rather not have complimented Felicity. "And you needn't laugh at Bev. His stripes are beautiful. It isn't HE that is striped. It's just the THOUGHT of him. Peg Bowen is a queer sort of yellowish green and the Awkward Man is lilac. Aunt Olivia is pansy-purple mixed with gold, and Uncle Roger is navy blue."

"I never heard such nonsense," declared Felicity. The rest of us were rather inclined to agree with her for once. We thought the Story Girl was making fun of us. But I believe she really had a strange gift of thinking in colours. In later years, when we were grown up, she told me of it again. She said that everything had colour in her thought; the months of the year ran through all the tints of the spectrum, the days of the week were arrayed as Solomon in his glory, morning was golden, noon orange, evening crystal blue, and night violet. Every idea came to her mind robed in its own especial hue. Perhaps that was why her voice and words had such a charm, conveying to the listeners' perception such fine shadings of meaning and tint and music.