“I shouldn’t have listened to her,” he confided to me one day. “You must never listen to flowers. You must look at them and smell them. Mine perfumed my planet, but I didn’t know how to enjoy that. The business about the tiger claws, instead of annoying me, ought to have moved me . . .” And he confided further, “In those days, I didn’t understand anything. I should have judged her accord-ing to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away!
