'm blind about lots of
things, but I do see that, now. I see how good you are. I used to think
you were too good to be true--that you must be a _poseur_. I was always
waiting for the time when you'd give yourself away--when you'd show
yourself on the same level with my brother and me."

"But I am on the same level."

"Don't say it! I don't feel that horrid, bitter wish now. I'm glad
you're higher than we are. It makes me better to look up to the place
where you are. But I wish I could get nearer."

"You are very near. We're friends, aren't we? You don't really mind
because I'm from the North and you from the South, and because we don't
quite agree about politics?"

"I'd forgotten about politics between you and me! But there are other
distances. Do take me into your garden. You say it belongs only to blind
people; but if I am blind--with a different kind of blindness, and
worse--can't I get there with you? I need such a garden, dreadfully. I'm
so disappointed in life."

"Tell me how you're unhappy, and how you've been disappointed," said
Brian. "Then perhaps we can find the right flowers to cure you, in the
garden."

So she told him what Julian had told me: about trying to get on the
stage, and not succeeding, and realizing that she couldn't act; feeling
that there was no vocation, no place for her anywhere. To comfort the
girl, Brian opened the gate of his garden of the blind, and gave her its
secrets, as he has given them to me. He explained to her his trick of
"seeing across far spaces," with the eyes of his mind, and heart: saying
aloud, to himself, names of glorious places--"Athens--Rome--Venice," and
going there in the airship of imagination; calling up visions of
rose-sunset light on the yellowing marble of the Acropolis, or moonlight
in the Pincian gardens, with great umbrella-pines like blots of ink on
steel, or the opal colours shimmering deep down, under the surface of
the Grand Canal. He made Dierdre understand his way of "listening to a
landscape," knowing by the voice of the wind what trees it touched; the
buzz of olive leaves bunched like hives of silver bees against the blue;
the sea-murmur of pines; the skeleton swish of palms; the gay, dancing
rustle of poplars. And he showed her how he gathered beauty and colour
from words, which made pictures in his brain.

"I never thought of all these things when I could see pictures with my
_eyes_--and paint them with my hands," he said. And perhaps he gave