“Don’t you love minds that are almost gone?” said Bob Rigsby. “What fascinating little remnants work their way up out of the clutter of a lifetime of memory—roses and a washhouse.”

There was something solid and comforting about the space in that old bank president’s office—its elegant proportions, its thick plaster walls, its grand oak wainscoting and rift-pine floor. Della and Bob Rigsby just sat for a while peacefully without talking. The late-afternoon light reflected off the white granite building across the street, so that for just a minute right at dusk, this room was filled with a filmy pink light.

“Everything I love is almost gone,” said Bob Rigsby. “Little towns like this, longleaf-pine woods, those old ladies today. Why, even the postage stamp I designed came out just a month before they raised the rates to thirty-seven cents.”

They watched the last light slide up the wall, then everything was in shadow.

“Why did she say ‘Monday’?” Bob Rigsby mused. “The Rose Queen of ’33.”

The next day in the art class Bob Rigsby talked about the history of this rose he was painting. “In our young country we know it for its connection with Thomas Jefferson,” he said. “But it is a rose of great antiquity, dating from the sixteenth century. It was called Rosamond’s rose after Fair Rosamond, an unfortunate mistress of Henry the Second.”

In the mirror they saw his wrist twitch, and there was a new fat bud; then his hand slid smoothly across, and what was red on the brush came out a pearly gray on the paper, and there was a shadowed leaf.

Watching it in the mirror gave the whole procedure a once-removed, dreamy feeling, and some of the viewers began talking as if Bob Rigsby weren’t sitting right there.

“I heard he painted a postage stamp,” said Emily Hancock.

“I have heard that a rose is the hardest of all flowers to paint,” said Lucille Patterson, “and look how good he’s doing it!”

“Well, of course he can paint a rose, Lucille,” said Ethel Livingstone. “He’s a famous painter! Just think how many thousands of people have licked that stamp.”

“Actually the stamp is self-adhesive,” Bob Rigsby said modestly, and he painted on and on, adding a leaflet and a calyx.

“Poor Rosamund,” he said, “she didn’t last. In one of those long-ago centuries the last syllable of her name got misunderstood as monde, the French word for ‘world,’ and the rose became known as ‘rose of the world.’” He rinsed his brush and looked up at them. “I am fascinated by the evolution of rose names.”

“Our town is known as the City of Roses,” said Miss Ethel, with schoolmarm precision. “Over ten thousand rosebushes are planted in the municipal rose beds.”