“How strange it is!” she went on. “You cannot have the remotest idea of what I am really like—as if it mattered!” She laughed apologetically. “It is strange, though, to think that though we are such friends, you have never seen my face.”
“You mean because you wear those glasses?” he replied, in the blunt, matter-of-fact way in which he generally did receive her personal allusions, and which disconcerted her and drove her to utter desperation sometimes. “I suppose you have some good reason for wearing them?”
“I have a reason, but I don’t know if it is a good one,” she replied in tones sharp from nervousness.
“You wear them under advice, I imagine?”
“No, really my own idea,” she said, airily. “Shall I take them off? Tell me to, and I will!”
Her voice was trembling, her hands were twitching with the overmastering desire to do away, once for all, with this absurd barrier between them. A woman, shorn of her powers, mulcted of her charm, handicapped, at the very moment when she needed the full arsenal of her feminine armoury! That was what she was, and his imperturbability irritated her vanity, and made it, for the moment, paramount.
She realized the full gravity of the situation, she felt it a turning point, she had attached an almost fetish-like importance to the insignia of her virtuous resolutions, but in the wild desire to assert her womanhood that mastered her now, she was prepared to abandon anything and everything that stood in the way of its accomplishment.
“Shall I take them off? Shall I?” was her irresponsible cry. “You have advised me to. Remember that.”
There was a pause—a century of vital emotion for her, the mere opportunity for an added touch of the brush on to a ticklish corner of his foreground for the painter.
“Did I?” he asked, carelessly, as she deliberately laid aside the spectacles, and looked him full in the face.