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.  You think this very wonderful?  Not at all.  It is no whit more wonderful than that a lizard’s tail chopped off runs about by itself, or that a dog can scent a foe or a thief whilst the foe or the thief is yet miles away.  All these things are most wonderful, or not at all so--just as you like.

In a little while she bore another child:  this time it was a fine fair creature, quite perfect in its hues and shapes.  “I never saw a prettier!” said an emperor butterfly, pausing near for a moment; at that moment the knife of the gardener severed the rosebud’s stalk.

“The lady wants one for her bouquet de corsage:  she goes to the opera to-night,” the man said to another man, as he took the young tea rose.

“What is the opera?” asked the mother rose wearily of the butterfly.  He did not know; but his cousin the death’s-head moth, asleep under a magnolia leaf, looked down with a grim smile on his quaint face.

“It is where everything dies in ten seconds,” he answered.  “It is a circle of fire; many friends of mine have flown in, none ever returned:  your daughter will shrivel up and perish miserably.  One pays for glory.”

The rose tree shivered through all her stalks; but she was still proud, and tried to think that all this was said only out of envy.  What should an old death’s-head moth know, whose eyes were so weak that a farthing rushlight blinded them?

So she lifted herself a little higher, and would not even see that the Banksiae were nodding to her; and as for her old friend the blackbird, how vulgar he looked, bobbing up and down hunting worms and woodlice! could anything be more outrageously vulgar than that staring yellow beak of his?  She twisted herself round not to see him, and felt quite annoyed that he went on and sang just the same, unconscious of, or indifferent to, her coldness.

With each successive summer Rosa Damascena became more integrally and absolutely a Rosa Indica, and suffered in proportion to her fashion and fame.