"I've never met a blind woman. Probably I never shall."
"You're talking to one this minute! When I'm with you, I always feel as if I were blind, and you could see."
"You're unjust to yourself."
"No, but I'm unjust to you—I mean, I have been. I must tell you before we go on, because you're too kind, too generous. I'm blind about lots of things, but I do see that, now. I see how good you are. I used to think you were too good to be true—that you must be a poseur. I was always waiting for the time when you'd give yourself away—when you'd show yourself on the same level with my brother and me."
"But I am on the same level."
"Don't say it! I don't feel that horrid, bitter wish now. I'm glad you're higher than we are. It makes me better to look up to the place where you are. But I wish I could get nearer."
"You are very near. We're friends, aren't we? You don't really mind because I'm from the North and you from the South, and because we don't quite agree about politics?"
"I'd forgotten about politics between you and me! But there are other distances. Do take me into your garden. You say it belongs only to blind people; but if I am blind—with a different kind of blindness, and worse—can't I get there with you? I need such a garden, dreadfully. I'm so disappointed in life."
"Tell me how you're unhappy, and how you've been disappointed," said Brian. "Then perhaps we can find the right flowers to cure you, in the garden."
So she told him what Julian had told me: about trying to get on the stage, and not succeeding, and realizing that she couldn't act; feeling that there was no vocation, no place for her anywhere. To comfort the girl, Brian opened the gate of his garden of the blind, and gave her its secrets, as he has given them to me. He explained to her his trick of "seeing across far spaces," with the eyes of his mind, and heart: saying aloud, to himself, names of glorious places—"Athens—Rome—Venice," and going there in the airship of imagination; calling up visions of rose-sunset light on the yellowing marble of the Acropolis, or moonlight in the Pincian gardens, with great umbrella-pines like blots of ink on steel, or the opal colours shimmering deep down, under the surface of the Grand Canal. He made Dierdre understand his way of "listening to a landscape," knowing by the voice of the wind what trees it touched; the buzz of olive leaves bunched like hives of silver bees against the blue; the sea-murmur of pines; the skeleton swish of palms; the gay, dancing rustle of poplars. And he showed her how he gathered beauty and colour from words, which made pictures in his brain.