"A great!...Lucky person! She had that refuge, that garment, while I stand here with nothing to protect me from evil fame; a naked temperament for any wind to blow upon.Yes, greatness in art is a protection.I wonder if there would have been anything in me if I had tried? But Henry Allegre would never let me try.He told me that whatever I could achieve would never be good enough for what I was.The perfection of flattery! Was it that he thought Ihad not talent of any sort? It's possible.He would know.I've had the idea since that he was jealous.He wasn't jealous of mankind any more than he was afraid of thieves for his collection;but he may have been jealous of what he could see in me, of some passion that could be aroused.But if so he never repented.Ishall never forget his last words.He saw me standing beside his bed, defenceless, symbolic and forlorn, and all he found to say was, 'Well, I am like that.'
I forgot myself in watching her.I had never seen anybody speak with less play of facial muscles.In the fullness of its life her face preserved a sort of immobility.The words seemed to form themselves, fiery or pathetic, in the air, outside her lips.Their design was hardly disturbed; a design of sweetness, gravity, and force as if born from the inspiration of some artist; for I had never seen anything to come up to it in nature before or since.
All this was part of the enchantment she cast over me; and I seemed to notice that Mills had the aspect of a man under a spell.If he too was a captive then I had no reason to feel ashamed of my surrender.
"And you know," she began again abruptly, "that I have been accustomed to all the forms of respect.""That's true," murmured Mills, as if involuntarily.
"Well, yes," she reaffirmed."My instinct may have told me that my only protection was obscurity, but I didn't know how and where to find it.Oh, yes, I had that instinct...But there were other instincts and...How am I to tell you? I didn't know how to be on guard against myself, either.Not a soul to speak to, or to get a warning from.Some woman soul that would have known, in which perhaps I could have seen my own reflection.I assure you the only woman that ever addressed me directly, and that was in writing, was..."She glanced aside, saw Mr.Blunt returning from the ball and added rapidly in a lowered voice,"His mother."The bright, mechanical smile of Mr.Blunt gleamed at us right down the room, but he didn't, as it were, follow it in his body.He swerved to the nearest of the two big fireplaces and finding some cigarettes on the mantelpiece remained leaning on his elbow in the warmth of the bright wood fire.I noticed then a bit of mute play.
The heiress of Henry Allegre, who could secure neither obscurity nor any other alleviation to that invidious position, looked as if she would speak to Blunt from a distance; but in a moment the confident eagerness of her face died out as if killed by a sudden thought.I didn't know then her shrinking from all falsehood and evasion; her dread of insincerity and disloyalty of every kind.
But even then I felt that at the very last moment her being had recoiled before some shadow of a suspicion.And it occurred to me, too, to wonder what sort of business Mr.Blunt could have had to transact with our odious visitor, of a nature so urgent as to make him run out after him into the hall? Unless to beat him a little with one of the sticks that were to be found there? White hair so much like an expensive wig could not be considered a serious protection.But it couldn't have been that.The transaction, whatever it was, had been much too quiet.I must say that none of us had looked out of the window and that I didn't know when the man did go or if he was gone at all.As a matter of fact he was already far away; and I may just as well say here that I never saw him again in my life.His passage across my field of vision was like that of other figures of that time: not to be forgotten, a little fantastic, infinitely enlightening for my contempt, darkening for my memory which struggles still with the clear lights and the ugly shadows of those unforgotten days.
