Chapter 3 - Page 2

thing, I of course soon saw, was to temporise to drop
the whole question for the present and yet so far as possible keep each of
the pair in view. I may as well say at once that this plan and this
process gave their principal interest to the next several months. Mrs.
Brash had turned up, if I remember, early in the new year, and her little
wonderful career was in our particular circle one of the features of the
following season. It was at all events for myself the most attaching; it's
not my fault if I am so put together as often to find more life in
situations obscure and subject to interpretation than in the gross rattle
of the foreground. And there were all sorts of things, things touching,
amusing, mystifying--and above all such an instance as I had never yet met-
-in this funny little fortune of the useful American cousin. Mrs. Munden
was promptly at one with me as to the rarity and, to a near and human view,
the beauty and interest of the position. We had neither of us ever before
seen that degree and that special sort of personal success come to a woman
for the first time so late in life. I found it an example of poetic, of
absolutely retributive justice; so that my desire grew great to work it, as
we say, on those lines. I had seen it all from the original moment at my
studio; the poor lady had never known an hour's appreciation--which
moreover, in perfect good faith, she had never missed. The very first
thing I did after inducing so unintentionally the resentful retreat of her
protectress had been to go straight over to her and say almost without
preliminaries that I should hold myself immeasurably obliged for a few
patient sittings. What I thus came face to face with was, on the instant,
her whole unenlightened past and the full, if foreshortened, revelation of
what among us all was now unfailingly in store for her. To turn the handle
and start that tune came to me on the spot as a temptation. Here was a
poor lady who had waited for the approach of old age to find out what she
was worth. Here was a benighted being to whom it was to be disclosed in
her fifty-seventh year--I was to make that out--that she had something that
might pass for a face. She looked much more than her age, and was fairly
frightened--as if I had been trying on her some possibly heartless London
trick--when she had taken in my appeal. That showed me in what an air she
had lived and--as I should have been tempted to put it had I spoken out--
among what children of darkness. Later on I did them more justice; saw
more that her wonderful points must have been points largely the fruit of
time, and even that possibly she might never in all her life have looked so
well as at this particular moment. It might have been that if her hour had
struck I