Then Arcadians would drop in.

I put it to any sensible man or woman, could I have been expected to give up my friends for the sake of a chrysanthemum?
Again, it was my custom of an evening, if not disturbed, to retire with my pipe into my cane chair, and there pass the hours communing with great minds, or, when the mood was on me, trifling with a novel.

Often when I was in the middle of a chapter Gilray's flower-pot stood up before my eyes crying for water.
He does not believe this, but it is the solemn truth.

At those moments it was touch and go, whether I watered his chrysanthemum or not.

Where I lost myself was in not hurrying to his rooms at once with a tumbler.
I said to myself that I would go when I had finished my pipe, but by that time the flower-pot had escaped my memory.