She started. I had alarmed her without intending it.
"Will Oscar's face be utterly unlike what I fancy it to be now?" she asked, in suddenly altered tones. "Do you mean to say that I have not had the right image of him in my mind all this time?"
I tried again to draw her off to another topic. What more could I do—with my tongue tied by the German's warning to us not to agitate her, in the face of the operation to be performed on the next day?
It was quite useless. She went on, as before, without heeding me.
"Have I no means of judging rightly what Oscar is like?" she said. "I touch my own face; I know how long it is and how broad it is; I know how big the different features are, and where they are. And then I touch Oscar, and compare his face with my knowledge of my own face. Not a single detail escapes me. I see him in my mind as plainly as you see me across this table. Do you mean to say, when I see him with my eyes, that I shall discover something perfectly new to me? I don't believe it!" She started up impatiently, and took a turn in the room. "Oh!" she exclaimed, with a stamp of her foot, "why can't I take laudanum enough, or chloroform enough to kill me for the next six weeks—and then come to life again when the German takes the bandage off my eyes!" She sat down once more, and drifted all on a sudden into a question of pure morality. "Tell me this," she said. "Is the greatest virtue, the virtue which it is most difficult to practice?"
"I suppose so," I answered.
She drummed with both hands on the table, petulantly, viciously, as hard as she could.
"Then, Madame Pratolungo," she said, "the greatest of all the virtues is—Patience. Oh, my friend, how I hate the greatest of all the virtues at this moment!"
That ended it—there the conversation found its way into other topics at last.
Thinking afterwards of the new side of her mind which Lucilla had shown to me, I derived one consolation from what had passed at the breakfast-table. If Mr. Sebright proved to be right, and if the operation failed after all, I had Lucilla's word for it that blindness, of itself, is not the terrible affliction to the blind which the rest of us fancy it to be—because we can see.