Chapter 10 - Page 2

seconds that
the person thus assaulted had by no means the figure of my military
friend. I felt a shock much greater than any I should have thought
possible when on this person's drawing near I knew her for poor
little Flora Saunt. At what moment she had recognised me belonged
to an order of mysteries over which, it quickly came home to me,
one would never linger again: once we were face to face it so
chiefly mattered that I should succeed in looking entirely
unastonished. All I at first saw was the big gold bar crossing
each of her lenses, over which something convex and grotesque, like
the eyes of a large insect, something that now represented her
whole personality, seemed, as out of the orifice of a prison, to
strain forward and press. The face had shrunk away: it looked
smaller, appeared even to look plain; it was at all events, so far
as the effect on a spectator was concerned, wholly sacrificed to
this huge apparatus of sight. There was no smile in it, and she
made no motion to take my offered hand.

"I had no idea you were down here!" I said and I wondered whether
she didn't know me at all or knew me only by my voice.

"You thought I was Mrs. Meldrum," she ever so quietly answered.

It was just this low pitch that made me protest with laughter. "Oh
yes, you have a tremendous deal in common with Mrs. Meldrum! I've
just returned to England after a long absence and I'm on my way to
see her. Won't you come with me?" It struck me that her old
reason for keeping clear of our friend was well disposed of now.

"I've just left her. I'm staying with her." She stood solemnly
fixing me with her goggles. "Would you like to paint me now?" she
asked. She seemed to speak, with intense gravity, from behind a
mask or a cage.

There was nothing to do but treat the question still with high
spirits. "It would be a fascinating little artistic problem!"
That something was wrong it wasn't difficult to see, but a good
deal more than met the eye might be presumed to be wrong if Flora
was under Mrs. Meldrum's roof. I hadn't for a year had much time
to think of her, but my imagination had had ground for lodging her
in more gilded halls. One of the last things I had heard before
leaving England was that in commemoration of the new relationship
she had gone to stay with Lady Considine. This had made me take
everything else for granted, and the noisy American world had
deafened my care to possible contradictions. Her spectacles were
at present a direct contradiction; they seemed a negation not only
of new relationships but of every old one as well. I remember
nevertheless that when after a moment she walked beside me on the
grass I found myself nervously hoping she wouldn't as yet at any
rate