The place rioted with the joy and the passion of roses, for buying and selling.  There were other flowers, nasturtiums, cornbottles, mignonette, but they had a diminished insignificant look in their tied-up bunches beside the triumph of the roses.  Farther on, beyond the cage of the money-changer, the country people were hoarse with crying their vegetables, in two green rows, and beyond that where the jostling crowd divided, shone a glimpse of oranges and pomegranates.  In this part there were many comers and goers, lean Mussulman table-servants, and fat Eurasian ladies who kept boarding-houses, Armenian women with embroidered shawls drawn over their heads, sailors of the port.  They came to pass that way, through the sweetness of it, and this made a coign of vantage for the men with trays who were very persecuting there.  Lindsay and Alicia stood together beside the roses, her hands were deep in them, he perceived with pleasure that their glow was reflected in her face.  “No,” she exclaimed with dainty aplomb to the man who sat cross-legged in muslin draperies on the table.  “These are certainly of yesterday.  There is no scent left in them—­and look!” she held up the bunch and shook it, a shower of pink petals and drops of water fell upon the round of her arm above the wrist where the laces of her sleeve slipped back.  Lindsay had something like a poetic appreciation of her, observing her put the bunch down tenderly as if she would not, if she could help it, find fault with any rose.  The dealer drew out another, and handed it to her; a long-stemmed, wide-open, perfect thing, and it was then that her glance of delight, wandering, fell upon Laura Filbert.  Lindsay looked instantly, curiously in the same direction, and Alicia was aware that he also saw.  There ensued a terse moment with a burden of silence and the strangest misgivings, in which he may have imagined that he had his part alone but which was the heavier for her because of him.  These two had seen the girl before only under circumstances that suggested protection, that made excuse, on a platform receiving the respect of attention, marching with her fellows under common conventions, common orders.  Here, alone, slipping in and out among the crowd, she looked abandoned, the sight of her in her bare white feet and the travesty of her dress was a wound.  Her humility screamed its violation, its debasement of her race; she woke the impulse to screen her and hurry her away as if she were a woman walking in her sleep.  She had on her arm a sheaf of the War Cry.  This was another indignity; she offered them right and left, no one had a pice for her except one man, a sailor, who refused the paper.  When he rejoined his companions there was a hoarse laugh, and the others turned their heads to look after her.

The flower-dealer eyed his customers with contemptuous speculation, seeing what had claimed their eyes.  There was nothing new, the “mem” passed every day at this hour.  She did no harm and no good.  He, too, looked at her as she came closer, offering her paper to Alladiah Khan, a man impatient in his religion, who refused it, mumbling in his beard.  With a gesture of appeal she pressed it on him, saying something.  Then Alladiah’s green turban shook, his beard, dyed red in Mecca, waggled; he raised his arm, and Laura in white astonishment darted from under it.  They seldom did that.