“I can easily make out,” I returned with hilarity, “how much you do!”

“Well, you’re very horrid.  Perhaps she’s too old.”

“Too old for what?” I persisted.

“For anything.  Of course she’s no longer even a little young; only preserved—­oh but preserved, like bottled fruit, in syrup!  I want to help her if only because she gets on my nerves, and I really think the way of it would be just the right thing of yours at the Academy and on the line.”

“But suppose,” I threw out, “she should give on my nerves?”

“Oh she will.  But isn’t that all in the day’s work, and don’t great beauties always—?”

“You don’t,” I interrupted; but I at any rate saw Lady Beldonald later on—­the day came when her kinswoman brought her, and then I saw how her life must have its centre in her own idea of her appearance.  Nothing else about her mattered—­one knew her all when one knew that.  She’s indeed in one particular, I think, sole of her kind—­a person whom vanity has had the odd effect of keeping positively safe and sound.  This passion is supposed surely, for the most part, to be a principle of perversion and of injury, leading astray those who listen to it and landing them sooner or later in this or that complication; but it has landed her ladyship nowhere whatever—­it has kept her from the first moment of full consciousness, one feels, exactly in the same place.  It has protected her from every danger, has made her absolutely proper and prim.  If she’s “preserved,” as Mrs. Munden originally described her to me, it’s her vanity that has beautifully done it—­putting her years ago in a plate-glass case and closing up the receptacle against every breath of air.  How shouldn’t she be preserved when you might smash your knuckles on this transparency before you could crack it?  And she is—­oh amazingly!  Preservation is scarce the word for the rare condition of her surface.  She looks naturally new, as if she took out every night her large lovely varnished eyes and put them in water.  The thing was to paint her, I perceived, in the glass case—­a most tempting attaching feat; render to the full the shining interposing plate and the general show-window effect.

It was agreed, though it wasn’t quite arranged, that she should sit to me.  If it wasn’t quite arranged this was because, as I was made to understand from an early stage, the conditions from our start must be such as should exclude all elements of disturbance, such, in a word, as she herself should judge absolutely favourable.  And it seemed that these conditions were easily imperilled.  Suddenly, for instance, at a moment when I was expecting her to meet an appointment—­the first—­that I had proposed, I received a hurried visit from Mrs. Munden, who came on her behalf to let me know that the season happened just not to be propitious and that our friend couldn’t be quite sure, to the hour, when it would again become so.  She felt nothing would make it so but a total absence of worry.