Maggie is the protagonist of the story ‘The Price of Flowers’ written by Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay. She is an English girl in her early teens, living with her widowed mother and working as typist in a Civil Service store. Extreme poverty left her without formal schooling. She is an innocent, credulous, lovable, yet expressive person who strikes us with an unblemished purity and moral and emotional depth of character.

She never complains about anything she lacks. She doesn’t wish for anything for herself. She never cries thinking about herself. She works, she suffers and she designs, but only for her dear ones. She does the job of a typist, despite the fact that it is a mechanical job. Necessity drives her. It is true that she is shy to play violin. But, She is candid and expressive enough to share with Mr. Gupta that she likes to do a job in which she can use her brain.

She is inclined to trust. She is pure and so, she sees the world in her own image- as spotless and true. Never even once she suspects anything- not the narrator, not other places and people, not even the ring with crystal which is supposed to carry occult powers. .

Maggie’s world is limited to work and family, which includes her mother and a brother, who overwhelms the story in absentia. She moves the readers to poignant emotional tempo on two occasions in the story- firstly when she implores Gupta to tell a lie to her mother that he sees her brother as alive and safe. Here, her moral conscience and emotional attachment are at odds with one another. But she hopes such a lie would be forgiven by god because it is well-meaning. The second scene of emotional intensity is the climax when she gives one shilling to buy flowers to be put on the grave of her brother in her name. The quality of her love touches the reader with its pain and sublimation.