Glasses

Chapter 12

Within a week after my return to London I went to the opera, of

which I had always been much of a devotee. I arrived too late for

the first act of "Lohengrin," but the second was just beginning,

and I gave myself up to it with no more than a glance at the house.

When it was over I treated myself, with my glass, from my place in

the stalls, to a general survey of the boxes, making doubtless on

their contents the reflections, pointed by comparison, that are

most familiar to the wanderer restored to London. There was the

common sprinkling of pretty women, but I suddenly noted that one of

these was far prettier than the others. This lady, alone in one of

the smaller receptacles of the grand tier and already the aim of

fifty tentative glasses, which she sustained with admirable

serenity, this single exquisite figure, placed in the quarter

furthest removed from my stall, was a person, I immediately felt,

to cause one's curiosity to linger. Dressed in white, with

diamonds in her hair and pearls on her neck, she had a pale

radiance of beauty which even at that distance made her a

distinguished presence and, with the air that easily attaches to

lonely loveliness in public places, an agreeable mystery. A

mystery however she remained to me only for a minute after I had

levelled my glass at her: I feel to this moment the startled

thrill, the shock almost of joy, with which I translated her vague

brightness into a resurrection of Flora. I say a resurrection,

because, to put it crudely, I had on that last occasion left our

young woman for dead. At present perfectly alive again, she was

altered only, as it were, by this fact of life. A little older, a

little quieter, a little finer and a good deal fairer, she was

simply transfigured by having recovered. Sustained by the

reflection that even her recovery wouldn't enable her to

distinguish me in the crowd, I was free to look at her well. Then

it was it came home to me that my vision of her in her great

goggles had been cruelly final. As her beauty was all there was of

her, that machinery had extinguished her, and so far as I had

thought of her in the interval I had thought of her as buried in

the tomb her stern specialist had built. With the sense that she

had escaped from it came a lively wish to return to her; and if I

didn't straightway leave my place and rush round the theatre and up

to her box it was because I was fixed to the spot some moments

longer by the simple inability to cease looking at her.

She had been from the first of my seeing her practically

motionless, leaning back in her chair with a kind of thoughtful

grace and with her eyes vaguely directed, as it seemed on me, to

one of the boxes on my side of the house and consequently over my

head and out of my sight. The only movement she made for some time

was to finger with an ungloved hand and as if with the habit of

fondness the row of pearls on her neck, which my glass showed me to

be large and splendid. Her diamonds and pearls, in her solitude,

mystified me, making me, as she had had no such brave jewels in the

days of the Hammond Synges, wonder what undreamt-of improvement had

taken place in her fortunes. The ghost of a question hovered there

a moment: could anything so prodigious have happened as that on

her tested and proved amendment Lord Iffield had taken her back?

This could scarce have without my hearing of it; and moreover if

she had become a person of such fashion where was the little court

one would naturally see at her elbow? Her isolation was puzzling,

though it could easily suggest that she was but momentarily alone.

If she had come with Mrs. Meldrum that lady would have taken

advantage of the interval to pay a visit to some other box--

doubtless the box at which Flora had just been looking. Mrs.

Meldrum didn't account for the jewels, but the revival of Flora's

beauty accounted for anything. She presently moved her eyes over

the house, and I felt them brush me again like the wings of a dove.

I don't know what quick pleasure flickered into the hope that she

would at last see me. She did see me: she suddenly bent forward

to take up the little double-barrelled ivory glass that rested on

the edge of the box and to all appearance fix me with it. I smiled

from my place straight up at the searching lenses, and after an

instant she dropped them and smiled as straight back at me. Oh her

smile--it was her old smile, her young smile, her very own smile

made perfect! I instantly left my stall and hurried off for a

nearer view of it; quite flushed, I remember, as I went with the

annoyance of having happened to think of the idiotic way I had

tried to paint her. Poor Iffield with his sample of that error,

and still poorer Dawling in particular with HIS! I hadn't touched

her, I was professionally humiliated, and as the attendant in the

lobby opened her box for me I felt that the very first thing I

should have to say to her would be that she must absolutely sit to

me again.