It is our privilege to entertain largely among roses; I don’t believe there is another shelf in Simla that holds so many. And I will hasten to say this for them, that in all my social experience they offer the best example of hospitality being its own reward, which, of course, goes without saying; but it is difficult to sit down for the first time in the year before the glory of the roses, and refrain from offering them a politeness of some sort, even one that might be taken for granted. I will add a compliment which is not perhaps quite so lamentably obvious. There are people--moderns, decadents--who will not subscribe to the paramountcy of the rose. They produce other flowers--hyacinths, violets, daffodils--to which they attach the label of their poor preference. I will not dispute any taste in theory, but I will say this broad, general thing which is evident and plain: once the roses are in bloom, nothing else in the garden matters. The rose may or may not be queen, but when she appears the other flowers dwindle into pretty little creatures of no great pretension who may come out or not at their convenience. You will admit that if there is a rose in sight you do not look at anything else. As to the daffodils, they came up a month ago, and I cut them and put them in the drawing-room and thought no more about it. So the garden for me this morning means roses (dear me, yes, those Gloire de Dijons alone command it for yards in every direction), and the excitement of it, the pure keen delicious excitement of it, makes me wonder whether a simple life led in a cane chair under a pencil-cedar is not a better background for the minor sensations than the most elaborate existence indoors. But that is another truism; elaboration is always bad, it prevents one’s seeing things. An existence obscured by curtains and frescoed with invitations from the Princess would never, I am surely convinced, afford me the exquisite joy and wonder, the sense of expanded miracle, that reigns in me at this moment. I must be allowed to say so, though nothing, I know, is so dull as the detailing of another person’s sensations. It will be admitted that I do not often gush, that is a claim I make with a good conscience; and if I were forbidden to write emotionally about roses this morning I should simply not write at all, which would be a breach of good manners and a loss of time. If the truth were confessed, I have wasted hours already congratulating them upon their happy advent, I have been much led away among them from my fountain pen; idleness is so perfect with a rose. After putting down that stupidity about our hospitality being its own reward, I fell into unnumbered asterisks, raptures in the manner of M. Pierre Loti, and only refrained from making them because one would not gasp too obviously after the master. And now that I have pulled my chair into the thickest shade of the pencil-cedar--it is little better after all than a spoke to sit under,