o a man who was a stranger to her. I declared, in the
plainest terms, that such a proceeding would be sufficient, in the
estimation of any civilized community, to put her reputation in peril.
The result of my interference was curious and interesting in the extreme.
It showed me that the virtue called Modesty (I am not speaking of
Decency, mind) is a virtue of purely artificial growth; and that the
successful cultivation of it depends in the first instance, not on the
influence of the tongue, but on the influence of the eye.

Suppose the case of an average young lady (conscious of feeling a first
love) to whom I might have spoken in the sense that I have just
mentioned--what would she have done?

She would assuredly have shown some natural and pretty confusion, and
would, in all human probability, have changed color more or less while
she was listening to me. Lucilla's charming face revealed but one
expression--an expression of disappointment, slightly mixed perhaps with
surprise. I believed her to be then, what I knew her to be afterwards, as
pure a creature as ever walked the earth. And yet, of the natural and
becoming confusion, of the little inevitable feminine changes of color
which I had expected to see, not so much as a vestige appeared--and this,
remember, in the case of a person of unusually sensitive and impulsive
nature: quick, on the most trifling occasions, to feel and to express its
feeling in no ordinary degree.

What did it mean?

It meant that here was one strange side shown to me of the terrible
affliction that darkened her life. It meant that modesty is essentially
the growth of our own consciousness of the eyes of others judging us--and
that blindness is never bashful, for the one simple reason that blindness
cannot see. The most modest girl in existence is bolder with her lover in
the dark than in the light. The female model who "sits" for the first
time in a drawing academy, and who shrinks from the ordeal, is persuaded,
in the last resort, to enter the students' room by having a bandage bound
over her eyes. My poor Lucilla had always the bandage over her eyes. My
poor Lucilla was never to meet her lover in the light. She had grown up
with the passions of a woman--and yet, she had never advanced beyond the
fearless and primitive innocence of a child. Ah, if ever there was a
sacred charge confided to any mortal creature, here surely was a sacred
charge confided to Me! I could not endure to see the