know what quick pleasure flickered into the hope that
she would at last see me. She did see me:
she suddenly bent forward to take up the little double-barrelled
ivory glass that rested on the edge of the box and
to all appearance fix me with it. I smiled from
my place straight up at the searching lenses, and
after an instant she dropped them and smiled as straight
back at me. Oh her smile—it was her
old smile, her young smile, her very own smile made
perfect! I instantly left my stall and hurried
off for a nearer view of it; quite flushed, I remember,
as I went with the annoyance of having happened to
think of the idiotic way I had tried to paint her.
Poor Iffield with his sample of that error, and still
poorer Dawling in particular with
his!
I hadn’t touched her, I was professionally
humiliated, and as the attendant in the lobby opened
her box for me I felt that the very first thing I should
have to say to her would be that she must absolutely
sit to me again.
She gave me the smile once more as over her shoulder,
from her chair, she turned her face to me. “Here
you are again!” she exclaimed with her disgloved
hand put up a little backward for me to take.
I dropped into a chair just behind her and, having
taken it and noted that one of the curtains of the
box would make the demonstration sufficiently private,
bent my lips over it and impressed them on its finger-tips.
It was given me however, to my astonishment, to feel
next that all the privacy in the world couldn’t
have sufficed to mitigate the start with which she
greeted this free application of my moustache:
the blood had jumped to her face, she quickly recovered
her hand and jerked at me, twisting herself round,
a vacant challenging stare. During the next few
instants several extraordinary things happened, the
first of which was that now I was close to them the
eyes of loveliness I had come up to look into didn’t
show at all the conscious light I had just been pleased
to see them flash across the house: they showed
on the contrary, to my confusion, a strange sweet
blankness, an expression I failed to give a meaning
to until, without delay, I felt on my arm, directed
to it as if instantly to efface the effect of her
start, the grasp of the hand she had impulsively snatched
from me. It was the irrepressible question in
this grasp that stopped on my lips all sound of salutation.
She had mistaken my entrance for that of another
person, a pair of lips without a moustache. She
was feeling me to see who I was! With the perception
of this and of her not seeing me I sat gaping at her
and at the wild word that didn’t come, the right
word to express or to disguise my dismay. What
was the right word to commemorate one’s sudden
discovery, at the very moment too at which one had
been most encouraged to count on better things, that
one’s dear old friend had gone blind?
Before the answer to this question dropped upon me—and
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