She was a Quatre Saison Rose Tree.

She lived in a beautiful old garden with some charming magnolias
for neighbors: they rather overshadowed her, certainly, because
they were so very great and grand; but then such shadow as that is
preferable, as every one knows, to a mere vulgar enjoyment of
common daylight, and then the beetles went most to the magnolia-
blossoms, for being so great and grand of course they got very
much preyed upon, and this was a vast gain for the rose that was
near them. She herself leaned against the wall of an orange-house,
in company with a Banksia, a buoyant, active, simple-minded thing,
for whom Rosa Damascena, who thought herself much better born than
these climbers, had a natural contempt. Banksiae will flourish and
be content anywhere, they are such easily pleased creatures; and
when you cut them they thrive on it, which shows a very plebeian
and pachydermatous temper; and they laugh all over in the face of
an April day, shaking their little golden clusters of blossom in
such a merry way that the Rose Tree, who was herself very reserved
and thorny, had really scruples about speaking to them.

For she was by nature extremely proud,--much prouder than her
lineage warranted,--and a hard fate had fixed her to the wall of
an orangery, where hardly anybody ever came, except the gardener
and his men to carry the oranges in in winter and out in spring,
or water and tend them while they were housed there.

She was a handsome rose, and she knew it. But the garden was so
crowded--like the world--that she could not get herself noticed in