l ever hold for me? Deryck, you know
Garth well enough to realise how dependent he is on beauty; he must be
surrounded by it, perpetually. Before this unaccountable need of each
other came to us he had talked to me quite freely on this point, saying
of a plain person whose character and gifts he greatly admired, and
whose face he grew to like in consequence: 'But of course it was not
the sort of face one would have wanted to live with, or to have day
after day opposite to one at table; but then one was not called to that
sort of discipline, which would be martyrdom to me.' Oh, Deryck! Could
I have tied Garth to my plain face? Could I have let myself become a
daily, hourly discipline to that radiant, beauty-loving nature? I know
they say, 'Love is blind.' But that is before Love has entered into his
kingdom. Love desirous, sees only that, in the one beloved, which has
awakened the desire. But Love content, regains full vision, and, as
time goes on, those powers of vision increase and become, by means of
daily, hourly, use,--microscopic and telescopic. Wedded love is not
blind. Bah! An outsider staying with married people is apt to hear what
love sees, on both sides, and the delusion of love's blindness is
dispelled forever. I know Garth was blind, during all those golden
days, to my utter lack of beauty, because he wanted ME so much. But
when he had had me, and had steeped himself in all I have to give of
soul and spirit beauty; when the daily routine of life began, which
after all has to be lived in complexions, and with features to the
fore; when he sat down to breakfast and I saw him glance at me and then
look away, when I was conscious that I was sitting behind the
coffee-pot, looking my very plainest, and that in consequence my boy's
discipline had begun; could I have borne it? Should I not, in the
miserable sense of failing him day by day, through no fault of my own,
have grown plainer and plainer; until bitterness and disappointment,
and perhaps jealousy, all combined to make me positively ugly? I ask
you, Deryck, could I have borne it?"

The doctor was looking at Jane with an expression of keen professional
interest.

"How awfully well I diagnosed the case when I sent you abroad," he
remarked meditatively. "Really, with so little data to go upon--"

"Oh, Boy," cried Jane, with a movement of impatience, "don't speak to
me as if I were a patient. Treat me as a human being, at least, and
tell me--as man to man--c