For, sitting there in your seven hundred carriages, you are blind--in heart, and soul, and voice, and walk; the blindest creature in the world. Never for one minute of your life have you thought, or done, or spoken for yourself. You have been prevented; and so wonderful is this plot to keep you blind that you have not a notion it exists. To yourself your sight seems good, such is your pleasant thought. Since you cannot even see this hedge around you, how can there be anything the other side? The ache beneath your corsets in the spring is all you are ever to know of what there is beyond. And no one is to blame for this--you least of all. It was settled, long before the well-fed dullard’s kiss from which you sprang. Forces have worked, in dim, inexorable progress, from the remotest time till they have bred you, little blind creature, to be the masterpiece of their creation. With the wondrous subtlety of Fate’s selection, they have paired and paired all that most narrowly approaches to the mean, all that by nature shirks the risks of living, all that by essence clings to custom, till they have secured a state of things which has assured your coming, in your perfection of nonentity. They have planted you apart in your expensive mould, and still they are at work--these gardeners never idle--pruning and tying night and day to prevent your running wild. The Forces are proud of you--their waxen, scentless flower! The sun beats down, and still your carriage does not move; and this delay is getting on your nerves. You cannot imagine what is blocking-up your way! Do you ever imagine anything? If all those goodly coverings that contain you could be taken off, what should we find within the last and inmost shell--a little soul that has lost its power of speculation. A soul that was born in you a bird and has become a creeping thing; wings gone, eyes gone, groping, and clawing with its tentacles what is given it. You stand up, speaking to your coachman! And you are charming, standing there, to us who, like your footman, cannot see the label “Blind.” The cut of your gown is perfect, the dressing of your hair the latest, the trimming of your hat is later still; your trick of speech the very thing; you droop your eyelids to the life; you have not too much powder; it is a lesson in grace to see you hold your parasol. The doll of Nature! So, since you were born; so, until you die! And, with his turned, clean-shaven face, your footman seems to say: “Madam, how you have come to be it is not my province to inquire. You are! I am myself dependent on you!” You are the heroine of the farce, but no one smiles at you, for you are tragic, the most tragic figure in the world. No fault of yours that ears and eyes and heart and voice are atrophied so that you have no longer spirit of your own!