me. We are not always (suffer me to remind you)
consistent with ourselves. The cleverest people commit occasional lapses
into stupidity--just as the stupid people light up with gleams of
intelligence at certain times. You may have shown your usual good sense
in conducting your affairs on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in the week.
But it doesn't at all follow from this, that you may not make a fool of
yourself on Thursday. Account for it as you may--for a much longer time
than it suits my self-esteem to reckon up, I suspected nothing and
discovered nothing. I noted his behavior in Lucilla's presence as odd
behavior and unaccountable behavior--and that was all.

During the first fortnight just mentioned, the London doctor came to see
Oscar.

He left again, perfectly satisfied with the results of his treatment. The
dreadful epileptic malady would torture the patient and shock the friends
about him no more: the marriage might safely be celebrated at the time
agreed on. Oscar was cured.

The doctor's visit--reviving our interest in observing the effect of the
medicine--also revived the subject of Oscar's false position towards
Lucilla. Nugent and I held a debate about it between ourselves. I opened
the interview by suggesting that we should unite our forces to persuade
his brother into taking the frank and manly course. Nugent neither said
Yes nor No to that proposal at the outset. He, who made up his mind at a
moment's notice about everything else, took time to decide on this one
occasion.

"There is something that I want to know first," he said. "I want to
understand this curious antipathy of Lucilla's which my brother regards
with so much alarm. Can you explain it?"

"Has Oscar attempted to explain it?" I inquired on my side.

"He mentioned it in one of his letters to me; and he tried to explain it,
when I asked (on my arrival at Browndown) if Lucilla had discovered the
change in his complexion. But he failed entirely to meet my difficulty in
understanding the case."

"What is your difficulty?"

"This. So far as I can see, she fails to discover intuitively the
presence of dark people in a room, or of dark colors in the ornaments of
a room. It is only when _she is told_ that such persons or such things
are present that her prejudice declares itself. In what state of mind
does such a strange feeling as this take its rise? It seems impossible
that she can have any conscious associations with colors, pleasant or