Chapter 5 - Page 2

certain other
possibilities. Let me do her that justice; her effort at magnanimity must
have been immense. There couldn't fail of course to be ways in which poor
Mrs. Brash paid for it. How much she had to pay we were in fact soon
enough to see; and it's my intimate conviction that, as a climax, her life
at last was the price. But while she lived at least--and it was with an
intensity, for those wondrous weeks, of which she had never dreamed--Lady
Beldonald herself faced the music. This is what I mean by the
possibilities, by the sharp actualities indeed, that she accepted. She
took our friend out, she showed her at home, never attempted to hide or to
betray her, played her no trick whatever so long as the ordeal lasted. She
drank deep, on her side too, of the cup--the cup that for her own lips
could only be bitterness. There was, I think, scarce a special success of
her companion's at which she wasn't personally present. Mrs. Munden's
theory of the silence in which all this would be muffled for them was none
the less, and in abundance, confirmed by our observations. The whole thing
was to be the death of one or the other of them, but they never spoke of it
at tea. I remember even that Nina went so far as to say to me once,
looking me full in the eyes, quite sublimely, "I've made out what you mean-
-she IS a picture." The beauty of this moreover was that, as I'm
persuaded, she hadn't really made it out at all--the words were the mere
hypocrisy of her reflective endeavour for virtue. She couldn't possibly
have made it out; her friend was as much as ever "dreadfully plain" to her;
she must have wondered to the last what on earth possessed us. Wouldn't it
in fact have been after all just this failure of vision, this supreme
stupidity in short, that kept the catastrophe so long at bay? There was a
certain sense of greatness for her in seeing so many of us so absurdly
mistaken; and I recall that on various occasions, and in particular when
she uttered the words just quoted, this high serenity, as a sign of the
relief of her soreness, if not of the effort of her conscience, did
something quite visible to my eyes, and also quite unprecedented, for the
beauty of her face. She got a real lift from it--such a momentary
discernible sublimity that I recollect coming out on the spot with a queer
crude amused "Do you know I believe I could paint you NOW?"

She was a fool not to have closed with me then and there; for what has
happened since has altered everything--what was to happen a little later
was so much more than I could swallow. This was the disappearance of the
famous Holbein from one day to the other--producing a consternation among
us all as great as if the Venus of Milo had suddenly vanished from the
Louvre. "She