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.
