"What! is white, whiter than this?"
"Fifty thousand times whiter than that!"
"Goot. Now mind! This paper is white," (he snatched her handkerchief out of her apron-pocket). "This handkerchief is white, too; whitest of white, both of them. First lesson, my lofe! Here in my hands is your favorite colors, in the time when you were blind."
"Those!" she exclaimed, pointing to the paper and the handkerchief, with a look of blank disappointment as he dropped them on the table. She turned over the pen-wiper and the hat, and looked round at me. Grosse, waiting to try another experiment, left it to me to answer. The result, in both cases, was the same as in the cases of the sheet of paper and the handkerchief. Scarlet was not half as red—black, not one-hundredth part as black—as her imagination had figured them to her, in the days when she was blind. Still, as to this last color—as to black—she could feel some little encouragement. It had affected her disagreeably (just as poor Oscar's face had affected her), though she had not actually known it for the color that she disliked. She made an effort, poor child, to assert herself, against her merciless surgeon-teacher. "I didn't know it was black," she said. "But I hated the sight of it, for all that."
She tried, as she spoke, to toss the hat on to a chair, standing close by her—and threw it instead, high above the back of the chair, against the wall, at least six feet away from the object at which she had aimed. "I am a helpless fool!" she burst out; her face flushing crimson with mortification. "Don't let Oscar see me! I can't bear the thought of making myself ridiculous before him! He is coming here," she added, turning to me entreatingly. "Manage to make some excuse for his not seeing me till later in the day."
I promised to find the excuse—all the more readily, that I now saw an unexpected chance of reconciling her in some degree (so long as she was learning to see) to the blank produced in her life by Oscar's absence.
She addressed herself again to Grosse.
"Go on!" she said impatiently. "Teach me to be something better than an idiot—or put the bandage on, and blind me again. My eyes are of no use to me! Do you hear?" she cried furiously, taking him by his broad shoulders and shaking him with all her might—"my eyes are of no use to me!"
"Now! now! now!" cried Grosse. "If you don't keep your tempers, you little spitfire, I will teach you nothing." He took up the sheet of paper and the pen-wiper; and, forcing her to sit down, placed them together before her, in her lap.
"Do you know one thing?" he went on. "Do you know what is meant by an objects which is square? Do you know what is meant by an objects which is round?"