safe. How will any one ever look at her if she makes herself a fright?
How could she ever have got engaged if she had made herself a fright from
the first? It's no use to insist that with her beauty she can never _be_
a fright. She said to me this morning, poor girl, the most
characteristic, the most harrowing things. 'My face is all I have--and
_such_ a face! I knew from the first I could do anything with it. But I
needed it all--I need it still, every exquisite inch of it. It isn't as
if I had a figure or anything else. Oh if God had only given me a figure
too, I don't say! Yes, with a figure, a really good one, like Fanny
Floyd-Taylor's, who's hideous, I'd have risked plain glasses. Que voulez-
vous? No one is perfect.' She says she still has money left, but I
don't believe a word of it. She has been speculating on her impunity, on
the idea that her danger would hold off: she has literally been running a
race with it. Her theory has been, as you from the first so clearly saw,
that she'd get in ahead. She swears to me that though the 'bar' is too
cruel she wears when she's alone what she has been ordered to wear. But
when the deuce is she alone? It's herself of course that she has
swindled worst: she has put herself off, so insanely that even her
conceit but half accounts for it, with little inadequate concessions,
little false measures and preposterous evasions and childish hopes. Her
great terror is now that Iffield, who already has suspicions, who has
found out her pince-nez but whom she has beguiled with some unblushing
hocus-pocus, may discover the dreadful facts; and the essence of what she
wanted this morning was in that interest to square me, to get me to deny
indignantly and authoritatively (for isn't she my 'favourite sitter?')
that she has anything in life the matter with any part of her. She
sobbed, she 'went on,' she entreated; after we got talking her
extraordinary nerve left her and she showed me what she has been
through--showed me also all her terror of the harm I could do her. 'Wait
till I'm married! wait till I'm married!' She took hold of me, she