n 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 keep them still 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 turned pale.

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! I knew 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 I had 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 wi