‘Oh, I’m no good at that.’
How bored, how careless a voice!
‘Shall I switch on the light?’ said someone.
‘No!’ said Judith loudly.
She lifted up her arm against the window. The kimono sleeve fell back from it, and it gleamed cold and frail in the moonlight, like a snake. She spread out her long fingers and stared at them.
‘I would like to be blind,’ she said. ‘I really wish I were blind. Then I might learn to see with my fingers. I might learn to hear properly too.’
And learn to be indifferent to Jennifer; never to be enslaved again by the lines and colours of her physical appearance, the ever new surprise and delight of them; learn, in calm perpetual darkness, how the eyes’ tyrannical compulsions had obscured and distorted all true values. To be struck blind now this moment, so that the dreadful face of the voice by the fireplace remained for ever unknown!... Soon the light would go on, and painfully, hungrily, with awful haste and reluctance, the eyes would begin their work again, fly to their target.
‘Don’t be absurd, Judith,’ said someone. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’; and went on to talk of work among the blind, of blinded soldiers, of St. Dunstan’s.
The conversation became general and followed the usual lines: it was better to be deaf than blind, blind than deaf. Jennifer and Geraldine were silent.
‘Oh, it’s time we went to bed,’ said someone. ‘Jennifer, I must go to bed. I’m almost asleep. What’s the time?’