"But if people won't look at me?"
"They will."
"They will?" Mrs. Medwin was eager.
"They shall," her hostess went on. "It's their only having heard—without having seen."'
"But if they stare straight the other way?" Mrs. Medwin continued to object. "You can't simply go up to them and twist their heads about."
"It's just what I can," said Mamie Cutter.
But her charming visitor, heedless for the moment of this attenuation, had found the way to put it. "It's the old story. You can't go into the water till you swim, and you can't swim till you go into the water. I can't be spoken to till I'm seen, but I can't be seen till I'm spoken to."
She met this lucidity, Miss Cutter, with but an instant's lapse. "You say I can't twist their heads about. But I have twisted them."
It had been quietly produced, but it gave her companion a jerk. "They say 'Yes'?"
She summed it up. "All but one. She says 'No.'"