First she hastened to the thicket-like rosary.  There, in the last flickering of the gloaming, she searched the beds and gathered all the roses that hung languishing at the approach of winter.  She plucked them from down below, quite heedless of their thorns; she plucked them in front of her, with both hands; she plucked them from above, rising upon tip-toes and pulling down the boughs.  So eager was she, so desperate was her haste, that she even broke the branches, she, who had ever shown herself tender to the tiniest blades of grass.  Soon her arms were full of roses, she tottered beneath her burden of flowers.  And having quite stripped the rose trees, carrying away even the fallen petals, she turned her steps to the pavilion; and when she had let her load of blossoms slip upon the floor of the room with the blue ceiling, she again went down to the garden.

This time she sought the violets.  She made huge bunches of them, which she pressed one by one against her breast.  Then she sought the carnations, plucking them all, even to the buds; massing them together in big sheaves of white blossoms that suggested bowls of milk, and big sheaves of the red ones, that seemed like bowls of blood.  Then, too, she sought the stocks, the patches of mirabilis, the heliotropes and the lilies.  She tore the last blossoming stocks off by the handful, pitilessly crumpling their satin ruches; she devastated the beds of mirabilis, whose flowers were scarcely opening to the evening air; she mowed down the field of heliotropes, piling her harvest of blooms into a heap; and she thrust bundles of lilies under her arms like handles of reeds.  When she was again laden with as much as she could carry, she returned to the pavilion to cast the violets, the carnations, the lilies, the stocks, the heliotrope, and the mirabilis by the side of the roses.  And then, without stopping to draw breath, she went down yet again.

This time she repaired to that gloomy corner which seemed like the graveyard of the flower-garden.  A warm autumn had there brought on a second crop of spring flowers.  She raided the borders of tuberoses and hyacinths; going down upon her knees, and gathering her harvest with all a miser’s care, lest she should miss a single blossom.  The tuberoses seemed to her to be extremely precious flowers, which would distil drops of gold and wealth and wondrous sweetness.  The hyacinths, beaded with pearly blooms, were like necklets, whose every pearl would pour forth joys unknown to man.  And although she almost buried herself beneath the mass of tuberoses and hyacinths which she plucked, she next stripped a field of poppies, and even found means to crop an expanse of marigolds farther on.  All these she heaped over the tuberoses and hyacinths, and then ran back to the room with the blue ceiling, taking the greatest care as she went that the breeze should not rob her of a single pistil.  And once more did she come downstairs.