“Why, first, I get the advantage of your eyes, and then I get the satisfaction of supporting you. ‘I was an eye to the blind,’ that is you; and ‘a foot to the lame,’ that is myself.”[51]
They reached the door as she spoke these words.
“That girl is blind,” said Fulvius to Corvinus. “Do you not see how straight she walks, without looking right or left?”
“So she is,” answered the other. “Surely this is not the place so often spoken of, where beggars meet, and the blind see, and the lame walk, and all feast together? But yet I observed these people were so different from the mendicants on the Arician bridge.[52] They appeared respectable and even cheerful; and not one asked me for alms as he passed.”
“It is very strange; and I should like to discover the mystery. A good job might, perhaps, be got out of it. The old patrician, you say, is very rich?”
“Immensely!”
“Humph! How could one manage to get in?”
“I have it! I will take off my shoes, screw up one leg like a cripple, and join the next group of queer ones that come, and go boldly in, doing as they do.”
“That will hardly succeed; depend upon it every one of these people is known at the house.”
“I am sure not, for several of them asked me if this was the house of the Lady Agnes.”