Soon she was carried quite inside the house, into an immense room
with a beautiful dome-shaped ceiling, painted in fresco three
centuries before, and fresh as though it had been painted
yesterday. At the end of the room was a great chair, gilded and
painted, too, three centuries before, and covered with velvet,
gold-fringed, and powdered with golden grasshoppers. "That common
insect here!" thought Rosa, in surprise, for she did not know that
the chief of the house, long, long, long ago, when sleeping in the
heat of noon in Palestine in the first crusade, had been awakened
by a grasshopper lighting on his eyelids, and so had been aroused
in time to put on his armor and do battle with a troop attacking
Saracen cavalry, and beat them; wherefore, in gratitude, he had
taken the humble field-creature as his badge for evermore.

They set the roots of Rosa Indica now into a vase--such a vase!
the royal blue of Sevres, if you please, and with border and
scroll work and all kinds of wonders and glories painted on it and
gilded on it, and standing four feet high if it stood one inch! I
could never tell you the feelings of Rosa if I wrote a thousand
pages. Her heart thrilled so with ecstasy that she almost dropped
all her petals, only her vanity came to her aid, and helped her to
control in a measure her emotions. The gardeners broke off a good
deal of mould about her roots, and they muttered one to another
something about her dying of it. But Rosa thought no more of that
than a pretty lady does when her physician tells her she will die
of tight lacing; not she! She was going to be put into that Sevres
vase.

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.