When you buy an orchid, it is always a risk. You see only a dry, brown thing and you must be lucky. The plant may be ugly or dead, or it may be just a nice one. Or you might be really lucky and you buy a new kind with new colours and shapes. It was perhaps the hope of some such happy discovery that made Winter Wedderburn go so often to these sales. He was a shy and lonely man, who had enough money to make sure he didn’t have to work in his life. He could collect stamps or coins, or translate Horace, or write poems. But, he grew orchids in his little hothouse. “I think,” he said over his coffee, “that something is going to happen to me today.” He spoke, moved and thought slowly. “Oh, don’t say that!” his housekeeper, who was also his cousin, said. “You don’t understand me. I mean nothing bad…though I don’t know what I want to happen to me. Today,” he continued, after a pause, “Peters’ are going to sell some plants from the Andamans and the Indies. I will go to London and see what they have. I may buy some. ” He started to think. “Nothing ever happens to me,” he added. “I wonder why? A lot of things happen to other people.” “I suppose it’s annoying. But … you see, nothing ever happens to me. When I was a little boy I never had accidents. I never fell in love as I grew up. Never married… I wonder how it feels to have something happen to you, something really interesting.” 1. What theme is best suggested in Section 1 and illustrated by the character of Wedderburn? (Explain why, please.) A. The hope of emerging from obscurity B. The release that comes from relinquishing notions about beauty C. The maturing that happens when one is open to new love D. The pleasure to be found in nurturing new life