When the winter had passed and the summer had come round again,
the grafting had done its work: she was really a Rosa Indica, and
timidly put forth the first blossom in her new estate. It was a
small, rather puny yellowish thing, not to be compared to her own
natural red clusters, but she thought it far finer.
Scarcely had it been put forth by her than the gardener whipped it
off with his knife, and bore it away in proof of his success in
such transmogrifications.
She had never felt the knife before, when she had been only Rosa
Damascena: it hurt her very much, and her heart bled.
"Il faut souffrir pour etre belle," said the Banksiae in a good-
natured effort at consolation. She was not going to answer them,
and she made believe that her tears were only dew, though it was
high noon and all the dewdrops had been drunk by the sun, who by
noontime gets tired of climbing and grows thirsty.
Her next essay was much finer, and the knife whipped that off
also. That summer she bore more and more blossoms, and always the
knife cut them away, for she had been made one of the great race
of Rosa Indica.
Now, a rose tree, when a blossom is chopped or broken off, suffers
precisely as we human mortals do if we lose a finger; but the rose
tree, being a much more perfect and delicate handiwork of nature
than any human being, has a faculty we have not: it lives and has
a sentient soul in every one of its roses, and whatever one of
these endures the tree entire endures also by sympathy.
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