astic
images (utterly unlike the reality) the blind form of the people about
them. The patient was married, and was to see his wife (as Lucilla is one
day to see me) for the first time. He had been told, before he married
her, that she was personally disfigured by the scar of a wound on one of
her cheeks. The poor woman--ah, how well I can understand her!--trembled
for the consequences. The man who had loved her dearly while he was
blind, might hate her when he saw her scarred face. Her husband had been
the first to console her when the operation was determined on. He
declared that his sense of touch, and the descriptions given to him by
others, had enabled him to form, in his own mind, the most complete and
faithful image of his wife's face. Nothing that Mr. Sebright could say
would induce him to believe that it was physically impossible for him to
form a really correct idea of any object, animate or inanimate, which he
had never seen. He wouldn't hear of it. He was so certain of the result,
that he held his wife's hand in his, to encourage her, when the bandage
was removed from him. At his first look at her, he uttered a cry of
horror, and fell back in his chair in a swoon. His wife, poor thing, was
distracted. Mr. Sebright did his best to compose her, and waited till her
husband was able to answer the questions put to him. It then appeared
that his blind idea of his wife, and of her disfigurement had been
something so grotesquely and horribly unlike the reality, that it was
hard to know whether to laugh or to tremble at it. She was as beautiful
as an angel, by comparison with her husband's favorite idea of her--and
yet, because it was his idea, he was absolutely disgusted and terrified
at the first sight of her! In a few weeks he was able to compare his wife
with other women, to look at pictures, to understand what beauty was and
what ugliness was--and from that time they have lived together as happy a
married couple as any in the kingdom."

I was not quite sure which way this last example pointed. It alarmed me
when I thought of Lucilla. I came to a standstill again.

"How did Mr. Sebright apply this second case to Lucilla and to you?" I
asked.

"You shall hear," said Oscar. "He first appealed to the case as
supporting his assertion that Lucilla's idea of me must be utterly unlike
what I am myself. He asked if I was now satisfied that she could have no
correct conception of what faces and colors were really like?