"I'm blind," she explained, with what struck Hollister as infinite patience. "If my eyes were not sightless, I shouldn't have to ask a stranger about the Channel Islands. I used to be able to see them well enough."
Hollister stared at her. He could not associate those wide gray eyes with total darkness. He could scarcely make himself comprehend a world devoid of light and color, an existence in which one felt and breathed and had being amid eternal darkness. Yet for the moment he was selfish enough to feel glad. And he said so, with uncharacteristic impulsiveness.
"I'm glad you can't see," he found himself saying. "If you could——"
"What a queer thing to say," the girl interrupted. "I thought every one always regarded a blind person as an object of pity."
There was an unmistakably sardonic inflection in the last sentence.
"But you don't find it so, eh?" Hollister questioned eagerly. He was sure he had interpreted that inflection. "And you sometimes resent that attitude, eh?"
"I daresay I do," the girl replied, after a moment's consideration. "To be unable to see is a handicap. At the same time to have pity drooled all over one is sometimes irritating. But why did you just say you were glad I was blind?"
"I didn't mean that. I meant that I was glad you couldn't see me," he explained. "One of Fritz's shells tore my face to pieces. People don't like to look at the result. Women particularly. You can't see my wrecked face, so you don't shudder and pass on. I suppose that is why I said that the way I did."
"I see. You feel a little bit glad to come across some one who doesn't know whether your face is straight or crooked? Some one who accepts you sight unseen, as she would any man who spoke and acted courteously? Is that it?"
"Yes," Hollister admitted. "That's about it."