Certainly a rose is a lovely flower, and it is wonderful what gardeners have done to tend, improve, and develop it, and it was hard to imagine that any of the great double complex blossoms that I held in my hand, were first cousin, and lineally descended from the wild rose of the hedges. Yet delicious as roses are, and beloved by most men, and women, there have been, and may be, for aught I know, some who still cordially hate them, as cordially as Lord Roberts is said to dislike the presence of a cat, or a certain Duchess that I have been told of, the approach of horses.
Marguerite of Navarre, the wife of Henry IV. of France, is said to have found the perfume of roses so repellent, that she fainted if one was brought her; and I remember in Evelyn’s Diary of 1670, an account of a dinner-party at Goring House, in which he tells us that, “Lord Stafford rose from table in some disorder, because there were roses stuck about the fruit at dessert.”
Sir Kenelm Digby also told a story of the same kind of Lady Selenger (St. Leger). Her antipathy to this flower he declared to have been so great, that some one laying a rose beside her cheek when asleep, thereby caused a blister to rise. Whether the story was true it is too long ago to tell; but by all accounts Sir Kenelm “was a teller of strange things.”
Whilst I was thinking over these old-world stories, I was suddenly interrupted by the entrance of my little girl.
“Oh, mamma,” cried Bess, with tears in her eyes, “only to think he—Hals—has to go, to go in two days.”
“Do not cry, little one,” I replied. “Papa and I have settled that I am to go off for a week to the seaside, and you shall come too; and even Mouse shall have her ticket.”
At this Bess was comforted, for the prospect of the sea, the sands, and a spade of her very own, were very consolatory. But the day that little Hals left us, she came to me just before going off to bed.
“Mum,” she said, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Yes, dear,” I replied.
“I’ve been thinking,” pursued Bess, “that somehow there ought to be—a way to keep a boy. Grown-up girls have husbands, I know,” she said. Then, after a momentary pause, “You have a great, great book of Harrod’s. Surely, somewhere, mamsie, they have a boy stall.”