t never in all her life
have looked so well as at this particular moment. It might have been
that if her hour had struck I just happened to be present at the
striking. What had occurred, all the same, was at the worst a notable
comedy.

The famous "irony of fate" takes many forms, but I had never yet seen it
take quite this one. She had been "had over" on an understanding, and
she wasn't playing fair. She had broken the law of her ugliness and had
turned beautiful on the hands of her employer. More interesting even
perhaps than a view of the conscious triumph that this might prepare for
her, and of which, had I doubted of my own judgement, I could still take
Outreau's fine start as the full guarantee--more interesting was the
question of the process by which such a history could get itself enacted.
The curious thing was that all the while the reasons of her having passed
for plain--the reasons for Lady Beldonald's fond calculation, which they
quite justified--were written large in her face, so large that it was
easy to understand them as the only ones she herself had ever read. What
was it then that actually made the old stale sentence mean something so
different?--into what new combinations, what extraordinary language,
unknown but understood at a glance, had time and life translated it? The
only thing to be said was that time and life were artists who beat us
all, working with recipes and secrets we could never find out. I really
ought to have, like a lecturer or a showman, a chart or a blackboard to
present properly the relation, in the wonderful old tender battered
blanched face, between the original elements and the exquisite final
"style." I could do it with chalks, but I can scarcely do it with words.
However, the thing was, for any artist who respected himself, to _feel_
it--which I abundantly did; and then not to conceal from _her_ I felt
it--which I neglected as little. But she was really, to do her complete
justice, the last to understand; and I'm not sure that, to the end--for
there was an end--she quite made it all out or knew where she was. When
you've been brought up for fifty years on black it must be hard to adjust
your organism at a day's notice to gold-colour. Her whole nature had
been pitched in the key of her supposed plainness. She had known how to
be ugly--it was the only thing she had learnt save, if possible, how not
to mind it. Being beautiful took in any case a new set of muscles.