I have an old, brown carved box. The lid is broken and tied with a string. In it I keep little squares of paper, with hair inside, a little picture that hung over my brother's bed when we were children, and other things as small. In it I have a rose. Other women also have such boxes where they keep such items, but no one has my rose.
When my eyes become dim, and my heart grows faint, and my faith in women flickers, the scent of that dead rose, withered for twelve years, comes back to me. I know there will be spring, as surely as the birds know it when they see tiny, quivering green leaves above the snow. Spring cannot fail us.
There were other flowers in the box once. There were a bunch of white acacias that had been gathered by the strong hand of a man as we passed down a village street on a hot afternoon. It had rained, and the drops fell on us from the leaves of the acacia trees. The flowers were damp; they made mildew marks on the paper I folded them in. After many years, I threw them away. There is nothing of them left in the box now. There is only a faint, strong smell of dried acacia, that reminds me of that summer afternoon. But the rose is still there.
It has been many years. Then, I was a girl of fifteen, and I went to visit in a small country town. It was two days' journey from the nearest village; the people there were mostly men. A few were married and had their wives and children with them, but most were single.
There was only one young girl there when I came. She was about seventeen, fair, and rather large. She had large, dreamy blue eyes and wavy, light hair; full, rather heavy lips, until she smiled; then her face broke into dimples, and all her white teeth shone. The hotel keeper may have had a daughter, and the farmer in the outskirts had two, but we never saw them. She reigned alone, like a queen. All the men worshiped her. She was the only woman they had to think of. They talked of her on the step, at the market, at the hotel; they watched for her at street corners; they hated the man she bowed to or walked with down the street. They brought flowers to the front door; they offered her their horses; they begged her to marry them when they dared. There was something noble and even heroic in this devotion of men to the best woman they knew. There was also something natural in it, that these men, shut off from the world, should give to one woman the worship that otherwise they would have given to twenty. And there was also something mean in their envy of one another. If she had raised her little finger, I suppose, she might have married any one of them.
Then I came. I do not think I was prettier. I certainly do not think I was as pretty as she was. But I was new, and she was old -- they all left her and followed me. They worshiped me. It was to my door they sent their flowers. It was now I they offered twenty horses when I could ride only one. It was for me they waited at street corners. And it was what I said and did that they talked of. Partly I liked it. I had lived alone all my life. No one ever had told me I was beautiful, but now they did. I believed them. I did not know it was simply a fashion, which one man had set and the rest followed without thought. I liked them to ask me to marry them, and to say, No. I hated them. I was still young. I did not know all men were my children, as the older woman knows when she learns about the world. I was too small to be tender. I liked my power. I was like a child with a new whip, which it goes about cracking everywhere, not caring against what.
I could not wind it up and put it away. Men were curious creatures, who liked me, and I could never tell why. Only one thing made me unhappy about it. I could not bear that they had left her for me. I liked her great dreamy blue eyes, I liked her slow walk and drawl. When I saw her sitting among the men, she seemed to me much too good to be among them. I would have given her all their compliments if she would once have smiled at me as she smiled at them, with all her face breaking into warmth, with her dimples and flashing teeth. But I knew it never could be. I felt sure she hated me, that she wished I was dead or that I had never come to the village. She did not know that once, when a man thought to win my favor by making fun of her slow drawl in front of me, that I turned on him so fiercely he never dared come up to me again. I hated the men for betting which of us was prettier, but I would not let her see that I cared about what she felt towards me.
She and I never spoke to each other.
If we met in the village street, we bowed and went our separate ways. When we shook hands, we did so silently and did not look at each other. But I thought she felt my presence in a room just as I felt hers.
At last the time came for me to leave. The day before, someone I knew gave a party in my honor, to which all the village was invited.
It was the middle of winter. There was nothing in the gardens but a few old flowers, and I suppose that for two hundred miles around there was not a rose to be bought for love or money. Only in the garden of a friend of mine, in a sunny corner between the oven and the brick wall, there was a rose tree growing which had on it one bud. It was white, and it had been promised to the fair haired girl to wear at the party.
When I arrived at the party and went to take off my coat, I found the girl there already. She was dressed in pure white, with her great white arms and shoulders showing, and her bright hair glittering in the candlelight. The white rose was pinned on her chest. She looked like a queen. I said "Good-evening," and turned away quickly to the mirror to arrange my old black scarf across my old black dress.
Then I felt a hand touch my hair.
"Stand still," she said.
I looked in the glass. She had taken the white rose from her dress and was fastening it in my hair.
"Dark hair is so nice," she said. "It makes the flowers look so pretty." She stepped back and looked at me. "It looks much better there!"
I turned around.
"You are so beautiful to me," I said.
"Y-e-s," she said, with her slow @Colonial drawl; "I'm so glad."
We stood looking at each other.
Then the men came in and swept us away to dance. All the evening we did not come near to each other. Only once, as she passed, she smiled at me.
The next morning I left the town.
I never saw her again.
Years afterwards I heard she had married and gone to @America. It may or may not be so -- but the rose -- the rose is still in my box! When my faith in people grows dim, and it seems that for want of love and generosity all will fail, then the scent of that small withered thing comes back -- spring will come, and it will not fail us. It will bring us love, and hope.
