made it out at all--the words were the mere hypocrisy of her reflective
endeavour for virtue. She couldn't possibly have made it out; her friend
was as much as ever "dreadfully plain" to her; she must have wondered to
the last what on earth possessed us. Wouldn't it in fact have been after
all just this failure of vision, this supreme stupidity in short, that
kept the catastrophe so long at bay? There was a certain sense of
greatness for her in seeing so many of us so absurdly mistaken; and I
recall that on various occasions, and in particular when she uttered the
words just quoted, this high serenity, as a sign of the relief of her
soreness, if not of the effort of her conscience, did something quite
visible to my eyes, and also quite unprecedented, for the beauty of her
face. She got a real lift from it--such a momentary discernible
sublimity that I recollect coming out on the spot with a queer crude
amused "Do you know I believe I could paint you _now_?"

She was a fool not to have closed with me then and there; for what has
happened since has altered everything--what was to happen a little later
was so much more than I could swallow. This was the disappearance of the
famous Holbein from one day to the other--producing a consternation among
us all as great as if the Venus of Milo had suddenly vanished from the
Louvre. "She has simply shipped her straight back"--the explanation was
given in that form by Mrs. Munden, who added that any cord pulled tight
enough would end at last by snapping. At the snap, in any case, we
mightily jumped, for the masterpiece we had for three or four months been
living with had made us feel its presence as a luminous lesson and a
daily need. We recognised more than ever that it had been, for high
finish, the gem of our collection--we found what a blank it left on the
wall. Lady Beldonald might fill up the blank, but we couldn't. That she
did soon fill it up--and, heaven help us, _how_ was put before me after
an interval of no great length, but during which I hadn't seen her. I