With each successive summer Rosa Damascena became more integrally
and absolutely a Rosa Indica, and suffered in proportion to her
fashion and fame.
True, people came continually to look at her, and especially in
Maytime would cry aloud, "What a beautiful Niphetos!" But then she
was bereaved of all her offspring, for, being of the race of
Niphetos, they were precious, and one would go to die in an hour
in a hot ballroom, and another to perish in a Sevres vase, where
the china indeed was exquisite but the water was foul, and others
went to be suffocated in the vicious gases of what the mortals
call an opera box, and others were pressed to death behind hard
diamonds in a woman's bosom; in one way or another they each and
all perished miserably. She herself also lost many of her once
luxuriant leaves, and had a little scanty foliage, red-brown in
summer, instead of the thick, dark-green clothing that she had
worn when a rustic maiden. Not a day passed but the knife stabbed
her; when the knife had nothing to take she was barren and chilly,
for she had lost the happy power of looking beautiful all the year
round, which once she had possessed.
One day came when she was taken up out of the ground and borne
into a glass house, placed in a large pot, and lifted up on to a
pedestal, and left in a delicious atmosphere, with patrician
plants all around her with long Latin names, and strange, rare
beauties of their own.
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