As I went down the stairs, dressed—if you could call it dressed—at last, how hideously conscious I was that I presented a spectacle of all that was least desirable in womanhood. Long familiarity with the fact had hardened me. I take it that no feminine thing becomes completely reconciled to the accident that she is not physically prepossessing. Women who are plain sometimes do not realise their plainness. I daresay that is true. Or they may cherish a hope that, in the eyes of someone, some day, they may not be plain. If, fatherless, brotherless, they live with five lovely sisters, and a still good-looking mother—who esteems beauty the only thing which is worth a woman’s having—both these consolations will be denied them. Long before they have reached years of maturity, they will have learnt, with that absolute certainty of conviction which leaves no room whatever for doubt, that they are ugly ducklings, and that, for such as they, this world has no good things; that, indeed, it is as sure as that the sky is above the earth, that none but idiots, or worse, will ever esteem them for themselves alone. And, though they become accustomed to this knowledge, and so pachydermatous, in a sense, there are occasions when the actualities of their position are as pin-pricks to make them wince as eagerly as if their skins had never been tanned, by the laying on of innumerable stripes, into hide at all.
The descent of the stairs which divided my bedroom from the drawing-room was one of those occasions. Worse luck for me. In the drawing-room were the men who had been the worshippers of the girl who was—last night; come, at that matutinal hour, to render her the proofs of their devotion. Going to them was the girl who was to-day; that grotesque caricature of the being they had known, and of whom they apparently still dreamed. Clearly, it was doubtful if this was a case in which they would perceive that it was “better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” No man cherishes a sentimental pang when he discovers that he has been deluded into loving a female Bottom in an ass’s head. The humour of the situation would probably appeal to them so much more strongly than to me.
Half-way down I encountered Jane, who, I rather suspect, had been keeping herself handy in the possible expectation of such an encounter. At sight of me she gave a jump.
“Lor’! Miss Norah, whatever has come to you! I shouldn’t hardly ever have known you; you look so different—really, I shouldn’t.”
“Do I look different? How?”
I was curious to learn how the matter appeared to her. Her way of seeing it might be as a straw to guide me as to the quarter from which I might expect the wind to blow in the interview to which I was advancing. Her eyes travelled over my features in stolid, observant fashion, as if she were searching out the peculiarities of a wooden figurehead.
“Really, miss, I couldn’t hardly say—I really couldn’t; though such a difference I never see. It’s more than a difference; you don’t seem as if you was the same person—that you don’t.”
“But I assure you that I am.”
“Excuse me, Miss Norah, but that you aren’t—you are not, really. Leastways, not so far as looks is concerned. If you could see yourself as you looked last night, and as you looks now, you yourself wouldn’t say you was the same—I don’t believe you would, really.”
It was encouraging to receive such a testimonial from Jane, especially as on her countenance sincerity was written large, and surprise, and, I rather fancied—it might have been only fancy, but I doubt it—disappointment too. If the alteration were so apparent to Jane, the not inhumanly critical, with what appalling obviousness would they not strike the keen-sighted gentlemen who awaited me in the drawing-room, and whose voices I already heard. The same reflection actually occurred to the handmaid of the crimson slippers—at the recollection of their splendours they still seemed to pinch me.