This was enough for her, as it is enough for the lady that she is going to be put into a hundred-guinea ball gown.

In she went.  It was certainly a tight fit, as the gown often is, and Rosa felt nipped, strained, bruised, suffocated.  But an old proverb has settled long ago that pride feels no pain, and perhaps the more foolish the pride the less is the pain that is felt—­for the moment.

They set her well into the vase, putting green moss over her roots, and then they stretched her branches out over a gilded trelliswork at the back of the vase.  And very beautiful she looked; and she was at the head of the room, and a huge mirror down at the farther end opposite to her showed her own reflection.  She was in paradise!

“At last,” she thought to herself, “at last they have done me justice!”

The azaleas were all crowded round underneath her, like so many kneeling courtiers, but they were not taken out of their pots; they were only shrouded in moss.  They had no Sevres vases.  And they had always thought so much of themselves and given themselves such airs, for there is nothing so vain as an azalea,—­except, indeed, a camellia, which is the most conceited flower in the world, though, to do it justice, it is also the most industrious, for it is busy getting ready its next winter buds whilst the summer is still hot and broad on the land, which is very wise and prudent in it and much to be commended.

Well, there was Rosa Indica at the head of the room in the Sevres vase, and very proud and triumphant she felt throned there, and the azaleas, of course, were whispering enviously underneath her, “Well, after all, she was only Rosa Damascena not so very long ago.”

Yes, they knew!  What a pity it was!  They knew she had once been Rosa Damascena and never would wash it out of their minds—­the tiresome, spiteful, malignant creatures!

Even aloft in the vase, in all her glory, the rose could have shed tears of mortification, and was ready to cry like Themistocles, “Can nobody give us oblivion?”

Nobody could give that, for the azaleas, who were so irritated at being below her, were not at all likely to hold their tongues.  But she had great consolations and triumphs, and began to believe that, let them say what they chose, she had never been a common garden wall rose.  The ladies of the house came in and praised her to the skies; the children ran up to her and clapped their hands and shouted for joy at her beauty; a wonderful big green bird came in and hopped before her, cocked his head on one side, and said to her, “Pretty Poll! oh, such a pretty Poll!”

“Even the birds adore me here!” she thought, not dreaming he was only talking of himself; for when you are as vain as was this poor dear Rosa, creation is pervaded with your own perfections, and even when other people say only “Poll!” you feel sure they are saying “You!” or they ought to be if they are not.