"She might have kept hers if she had profited by God's mercy, if she had done in time, done years ago, what was imperatively ordered her; if she hadn't in fine been cursed with the loveliness that was to make her behaviour a thing of fable. She may still keep her sight, or what remains of it, if she'll sacrifice--and after all so little--that purely superficial charm. She must do as you've done;she must wear, dear lady, what you wear!"
What my companion wore glittered for the moment like a melon-frame in August. "Heaven forgive her--now I understand!" She flushed for dismay.
But I wasn't afraid of the effect on her good nature of her thus seeing, through her great goggles, why it had always been that Flora held her at such a distance. "I can't tell you," I said, "from what special affection, what state of the eye, her danger proceeds: that's the one thing she succeeded this morning in keeping from me. She knows it herself perfectly; she has had the best advice in Europe. 'It's a thing that's awful, simply awful'--that was the only account she would give me. Year before last, while she was at Boulogne, she went for three days with Mrs. Floyd-Taylor to Paris. She there surreptitiously consulted the greatest man--even Mrs. Floyd-Taylor doesn't know. Last autumn in Germany she did the same. 'First put on certain special spectacles with a straight bar in the middle: then we'll talk'--that's practically what they say. What SHE says is that she'll put on anything in nature when she's married, but that she must get married first.
She has always meant to do everything as soon as she's married.
Then and then only she'll be safe. How will any one ever look at her if she makes herself a fright? How could she ever have got engaged if she had made herself a fright from the first? It's no use to insist that with her beauty she can never BE a fright. She said to me this morning, poor girl, the most characteristic, the most harrowing things. 'My face is all I have--and SUCH a face! Iknew from the first I could do anything with it. But I needed it all--I need it still, every exquisite inch of it. It isn't as if Ihad a figure or anything else. Oh if God had only given me a figure too, I don't say! Yes, with a figure, a really good one, like Fanny Floyd-Taylor's, who's hideous, I'd have risked plain glasses. Que voulez-vous? No one is perfect.' She says she still has money left, but I don't believe a word of it. She has been speculating on her impunity, on the idea that her danger would hold off: she has literally been running a race with it. Her theory has been, as you from the first so clearly saw, that she'd get in ahead. She swears to me that though the 'bar' is too cruel she wears when she's alone what she has been ordered to wear. But when the deuce is she alone? It's herself of course that she has swindled worst: she has put herself off, so insanely that even her conceit but half accounts for it, with little inadequate concessions, little false measures and preposterous evasions and childish hopes. Her great terror is now that Iffield, who already has suspicions, who has found out her pince-nez but whom she has beguiled with some unblushing hocus-pocus, may discover the dreadful facts; and the essence of what she wanted this morning was in that interest to square me, to get me to deny indignantly and authoritatively (for isn't she my 'favourite sitter?') that she has anything in life the matter with any part of her. She sobbed, she 'went on,' she entreated; after we got talking her extraordinary nerve left her and she showed me what she has been through--showed me also all her terror of the harm I could do her. 'Wait till I'm married! wait till I'm married!' She took hold of me, she almost sank on her knees. It seems to me highly immoral, one's participation in her fraud; but there's no doubt that she must be married: I don't know what I don't see behind it! Therefore," Iwound up, "Dawling must keep his hands off."
Mrs. Meldrum had held her breath; she gave out a long moan. "Well, that's exactly what I came here to tell him.""Then here he is." Our host, all unprepared, his latchkey still in his hand, had just pushed open the door and, startled at finding us, turned a frightened look from one to the other, wondering what disaster we were there to announce or avert.
Mrs. Meldrum was on the spot all gaiety. "I've come to return your sweet visit. Ah," she laughed, "I mean to keep up the acquaintance!""Do--do," he murmured mechanically and absently, continuing to look at us. Then he broke out: "He's going to marry her."I was surprised. "You already know?"
He produced an evening paper, which he tossed down on the table.
"It's in that."
"Published--already?" I was still more surprised.
"Oh Flora can't keep a secret!"--Mrs. Meldrum made it light. She went up to poor Dawling and laid a motherly hand upon him.
"It's all right--it's just as it ought to be: don't think about her ever any more." Then as he met this adjuration with a stare from which thought, and of the most defiant and dismal, fairly protruded, the excellent woman put up her funny face and tenderly kissed him on the cheek.
