But I had tried the lilac-bush myself with no better success.
"I think," I whispered to Eleanor, in English, "that we have smelt it all up." "Parlez-vous francais, mesdemoiselles!" cried Madame, and we filed out into the dusty street, at the corner of which sat another of our visible tokens of the coming of the season of flowers; a dirty, shrivelled old Irishwoman, full of benedictions and beggary, who, all through the summer, sold "posies" to the passers-by.

We school-girls were good customers to her.

We were all more or less sentimental, more or less homesick, and had more or less of that susceptibility to the influence of scents which may, some day, be the basis of a new school of medicine.
One girl had cultivated pinks and _Roses de Meaux_ in her own garden "at home," and Bridget was soon wise enough to discover that a nosegay composed of these materials was an irresistible temptation to that particular customer.

Another had a craving for the sight and smell of southernwood (or "old man," as Eleanor called it), and preferred it in combination with bachelor's buttons.
"There was an old woman 'at home' whom we used to go to tea with when we were children--my brother and I," she said; "there were such big bunches of southernwood by her cottage.

And bachelor's buttons all round the garden." The brother was dead, I knew, and there were two flattened "buttons" and a bit of withered "old man" gummed into her Bible.