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.
