The pet pupil of the Alms-House is FLORA POTTS, of course called the
Flowerpot; for whom a husband has been chosen by the will and bequest of
her departed papa, and at whom none of the other Macassar young ladies
can look without wondering how it must feel. On the afternoon after the
day of the dinner at the boarding-house, the Macassar front-door bell
rings, and Mr. EDWIN DROOD is announced as waiting to see Miss FLORA.
Having first rubbed her lips and cheeks, alternately, with her fingers,
to make them red; held her hands above her head to turn back the
circulation and make them white; and added a little lead-penciling to
her eyebrows to make them black; the Flowerpot trips innocently down
to the parlor, and stops short at some distance from the visitor in a
curious sort of angular deflection from the perpendicular.

"O, you absurd creature!" she says, placing a finger in her mouth and
slightly wriggling at him. "To go and have to be married to me whether
we want to or not! It's perfectly disgusting."

"Our parents _did_ rather come a little load on us," says EDWIN DROOD,
not rendered enthusiastic by his reception.

"Can't we get a _habeas corpus_, or some other ridiculous thing, and ask
some perfectly absurd Judge to serve an injunction on somebody?" she
asks, with pretty earnestness. "Don't, Eddy--do-o-n't." "Don't what,
FLORA?" "Don't try to kiss me, please." "Why not, FLORA?" "Because I'm
enameled." "Well, I do think," says EDWIN DROOD, "that you put on the
Grecian Bend rather heavily with me. Perhaps I'd better go."

"I wouldn't be so exquisitely hateful, Eddy. I got the gum-drops last
night, and they were perfectly splendid."