Re: Flower Girl: Ella & Carver
Ella, perhaps she was too dull to see threat or challenge. More likely that was the intended interpretation of the smile upon her lips, and she played her part well. Perhaps she'd begun all this as a mere slip of a girl, freckled and trusting and looking for warm food in her belly. But the girl standing before him was only a shell of that girl all those years ago. She was an exterior, and the interior had been shaped by years in that gilded cage and singing for her supper.
Her smile, as she looked at the dark and imposing religious man was warm and bright, as if she was attempting to obliterate his darkness with her own sunshine. She waited with the patience of a Sunday School teacher, and her patient was rewarded. "I've no idea how those flowers came to be here. I've no garden of my own yet, and all my blooms come from vendor sources," she told him, as if she was terribly perplexed by all this dingus with the camelias. "Perhaps them being sent in error is a sign that the new preacher's got the right of things," she suggested, for all the world seeming like she was too simple a dame to decide on the truth of that without better assistance.
But the subject of flowers for a jane, that she knew a thing or two about, and she moved to where he was with youthful enthusiasm that she was a few years too old for. "I knew it. I can always tell when someone's dizzy for a dame. Tell me about her, and we can find her something pretty. There's no handcuff upon your finger, so you're not married." Then, as if it had only just struck her. "You're not a priest, are you?"