Chapter 4 - Page 2

continued to muse. "I see!"

"Yet don't," I returned, "see too much. We CAN do more."

"Than Nina?" She was again on the spot. "It wouldn't after all be
difficult. We only want the directly opposite thing--and which is the only
one the poor dear can give. Unless indeed," she suggested, "we simply
retract--we back out."

I turned it over. "It's too late for that. Whether Mrs. Brash's peace is
gone I can't say. But Nina's is."

"Yes, and there's no way to bring it back that won't sacrifice her friend.
We can't turn round and say Mrs. Brash is ugly, can we? But fancy Nina's
not having SEEN!" Mrs. Munden exclaimed.

"She doesn't see now," I answered. "She can't, I'm certain, make out what
we mean. The woman, for HER still, is just what she always was. But she
has nevertheless had her stroke, and her blindness, while she wavers and
gropes in the dark, only adds to her discomfort. Her blow was to see the
attention of the world deviate."

"All the same I don't think, you know," my interlocutress said, "that Nina
will have made her a scene or that, whatever we do, she'll ever make her
one. That isn't the way it will happen, for she's exactly as conscientious
as Mrs. Brash."

"Then what is the way?" I asked.

"It will just happen in silence."

"And what will 'it,' as you call it, be?"

"Isn't that what we want really to see?"

"Well," I replied after a turn or two about, "whether we want it or not
it's exactly what we SHALL see; which is a reason the more for fancying,
between the pair there--in the quiet exquisite house, and full of
superiorities and suppressions as they both are--the extraordinary
situation. If I said just now that it's too late to do anything but assent
it's because I've taken the full measure of what happened at my studio. It
took but a few moments--but she tasted of the tree."

My companion wondered. "Nina?"

"Mrs. Brash." And to have to put it so ministered, while I took yet
another turn, to a sort of agitation. Our attitude was a responsibility.

But I had suggested something else to my friend, who appeared for a moment
detached. "Should you say she'll hate her worse if she DOESN'T see?"

"Lady Beldonald? Doesn't see what we see, you mean, than if she does? Ah
I give THAT up!" I laughed. "But what I can tell you is why I hold that,
as I said just now, we can do most. We can do this: we can give to a
harmless and sensitive creature hitherto practically disinherited--and give
with an unexpectedness that will immensely add to its price--the pure joy
of a deep draught of the very pride of life, of an acclaimed personal
triumph in our superior sophisticated world."

Mrs. Munden had a glow of response for my sudden