Chapter 1 - Page 2

longer even a little young; only
preserved--oh but preserved, like bottled fruit, in syrup! I want to help
her if only because she gets on my nerves, and I really think the way of it
would be just the right thing of yours at the Academy and on the line."

"But suppose," I threw out, "she should give on my nerves?"

"Oh she will. But isn't that all in the day's work, and don't great
beauties always--?"

"YOU don't," I interrupted; but I at any rate saw Lady Beldonald later on--
the day came when her kinswoman brought her, and then I saw how her life
must have its centre in her own idea of her appearance. Nothing else about
her mattered--one knew her all when one knew that. She's indeed in one
particular, I think, sole of her kind--a person whom vanity has had the odd
effect of keeping positively safe and sound. This passion is supposed
surely, for the most part, to be a principle of perversion and of injury,
leading astray those who listen to it and landing them sooner or later in
this or that complication; but it has landed her ladyship nowhere whatever-
-it has kept her from the first moment of full consciousness, one feels,
exactly in the same place. It has protected her from every danger, has
made her absolutely proper and prim. If she's "preserved," as Mrs. Munden
originally described her to me, it's her vanity that has beautifully done
it--putting her years ago in a plate-glass case and closing up the
receptacle against every breath of air. How shouldn't she be preserved
when you might smash your knuckles on this transparency before you could
crack it? And she is--oh amazingly! Preservation is scarce the word for
the rare condition of her surface. She looks NATURALLY new, as if she took
out every night her large lovely varnished eyes and put them in water. The
thing was to paint her, I perceived, in the glass case--a most tempting
attaching feat; render to the full the shining interposing plate and the
general show-window effect.

It was agreed, though it wasn't quite arranged, that she should sit to me.
If it wasn't quite arranged this was because, as I was made to understand
from an early stage, the conditions from our start must be such as should
exclude all elements of disturbance, such, in a word, as she herself should
judge absolutely favourable. And it seemed that these conditions were
easily imperilled. Suddenly, for instance, at a moment when I was
expecting her to meet an appointment--the first--that I had proposed, I
received a hurried visit from Mrs. Munden, who came on her behalf to let me
know that the season happened just not to be propitious and that our friend
couldn't be quite sure, to the hour, when it would again become so. She
felt nothing would make it so but a total absence