Miss Foxe works as a florist assistant to Mrs. Nash. While Miss Foxe knows much more about flowers and their symbolic meanings than Mrs. Nash does, she does not speak up, worried that she will be fired. Miss Foxe is passionate about flowers and fairy tales; she likes their structured order and the transformations in them.

Wanting romance, Miss Foxe starts looking to date, first going to bars, libraries, and bookstores, where she is unsuccessful, and later posting an advertisement in the newspaper at Mrs. Nash’s suggestion. Her ad reads: “Fairy-tale princess seeks fairy-tale prince. Sarcastic and/or ironic replies will be ignored; I am in earnest, and you had better be, too” (75). She receives many responses—some authentic, some unsettling, and some sarcastic or ironic—and she gets a foxglove flower from someone named Fitcher. Foxgloves have an ambiguous meaning—“beauty and danger, poison and antidote” (75). Excited by his apparent knowledge of flowers, Miss Foxe writes to Fitcher, and they later meet.

Fitcher is quiet and calculating, which unsettles Miss Foxe initially. They talk about fairy tales and meet several times. They hold hands on their fourth date, and he buys her a nightingale on their sixth date.