It was an ordeal for everybody–singer, pianist, and music-sustainer. But the audience was friendly, and the composer and the poet were too dead to gyrate in their distant graves. The song, therefore, had unmitigated success, and the words were so familiar that everybody knew pretty well what Pamela was driving at when she sang: ’Tis thuh lah-ha-ha strow zof sum-mah Le-ef’ bloo-oo-hoo-minnng uh-lone; Aw lur lu-uh-uh vlee come-pan-yun Zah-har fay-ay-yay dud ahnd gawn– No-woe flow-wurr rof her kinn-drud, No-woe ro-hose buh dis ni-eye-eye-eye-eye-eye To re-fle-eh-ec’ bah-cur blu-shuzz Aw-hor gi-yi-hiv su-high for su-high! There was hardly a dry eye or a protesting ear in the throng as she reached the climax: Thu-us ki-yine-dlee I scat-tur-r-r Thy-hi lea-heave zore thuh be-eh-eh-eh-eh-head Whur-r-r thy may-hay-yate zuv thuh gar-r-dun-n-n-n Lie-eye sceh-eh-entluss ahnd dead, Whur-r thy may-YAH-YAH-yah thuh gah-dah Lie-eye sceh-heh-hen-less ahnd-ah dead-ah. The girl’s mother was not hard to find among the applauding auditors. She looked like the wrecked last September’s rose of which her daughter was the next June’s bud. The softened mood of Birdaline and the tears that bedewed her cheeks gave her back just enough of the beauty she had had to emphasize how much she had lost. And Josie, her quondam rival in the garden, was sweetened by melancholy, too. It was not hospitality alone, nor mere generosity, but a passing sympathy that warmed her tone as she squeezed Birdaline’s arm and told her how well her daughter had sung. A number of matrons felt the same attar of regret in the air. They had been beautiful in their days and in their ways, and now they felt like the dismantled rose on the floor. The common tragedy of beauty belated and foredone saddened everybody in the room; the old women had experienced it, the young women foresaw it, the men knew it as the destruction of the beauties they loved or had loved. Everybody was sad but Deborah Larrabee. That homely little old spinster slipped impudently into the elbow of the piano–into the place still warm from the presence of Pamela–and she railed at the sorrow of her schoolmates, Josie and Birdaline. Her voice was as sharp as the old piano-strings: "That song’s all wrong, seems to me, girls. Pretty toon and nice words, but I can’t make out why ever’body feels sorry for the last rose of summer. It’s the luckiest rose in the world. The rest of ’em have bloomed too soon or just when all the other roses are blooming, or when people are sort of tired of roses. But this one is saved up till the last. And then, when the garden is all dying out and the bushes are just dead stalks and the other roses are wilted and brown and folks say, ’I’d give anything for the sight of a rose,’ along comes this rose and–blooms alone!