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 has simply shippe