He did this with the peculiar touch of the botanist.

In naming the little green plant to her he used the Latin name, thus disguising some flower familiar even to Chelsea, and making her exclaim, half in amusement, at his knowledge.

Her own ignorance was vast, she confessed.
What did one call that tree opposite, for instance, supposing one condescended to call it by its English name?
Beech or elm or sycamore?
It chanced, by the testimony of a dead leaf, to be oak; and a little attention to a diagram which Denham proceeded to draw upon an envelope soon put Katharine in possession of some of the fundamental distinctions between our British trees.

She then asked him to inform her about flowers.

To her they were variously shaped and colored petals, poised, at different seasons of the year, upon very similar green stalks; but to him they were, in the first instance, bulbs or seeds, and later, living things endowed with sex, and pores, and susceptibilities which adapted themselves by all manner of ingenious devices to live and beget life, and could be fashioned squat or tapering, flame-colored or pale, pure or spotted, by processes which might reveal the secrets of human existence.
Denham spoke with increasing ardor of a hobby which had long been his in secret.