"Yet you are doing this just to be true to your windmills. You're doing it out of nothing more than blind and quixotic generosity."
The fact that my allusion had not been lost on her pleased me a little more, I think, than did her stare of perplexed commiseration.
"Isn't is odd," she said, "how we go wrong about things, how we jump at conclusions and misjudge people? You think, at this very moment, that I'm the one who sees crooked, that I'm the one who's lost my perspective on things. And now I'm going to do something I hadn't the remotest intention of doing when you came into this room."
"And what is that?"
"I'm going to show you how wrong you've been, how wrong you are."
"In what?" I inquired as she again sat in silence before me.
"In everything," she finally answered, as she rose to her feet. I was at once more conscious of her physical appeal, of her inalienable bodily buoyancy, as I saw her standing there at her full height. The deep flow of color in her loosely draped gown gave her an almost pontifical stateliness. Instinctively I rose as she did. And I could see by her eyes that the courtesy was neither negligible nor distasteful to her. She was about to say something; then she stopped and looked at me for a hesitating moment or two.
One would have thought, from the solemnity of that stare, that she faced the very Rubicon of her life. But a moment later she laughed aloud, and with a multitudinous rustling of skirts crossed the room and opened an inner door.
Through this door, for a moment or two, she completely left my sight. Then she returned, holding a cabinet photograph in her hand.
"Do you know it?" she quietly asked as she passed it over to me.