“Yes, I am mysterious, I suppose,” she went on, leaning her elbows on the table in front of her and looking fixedly at him through her glasses. She had drunk nothing but water at dinner, yet her cheeks burned with an unaccountable flush, and her eyes were bright with excitement. “How strange it is!” she went on. “You cannot have the remotest idea of what I am really like--as if it mattered!” She laughed apologetically. “It is strange, though, to think that though we are such friends, you have never seen my face.” “You mean because you wear those glasses?” he replied, in the blunt, matter-of-fact way in which he generally did receive her personal allusions, and which disconcerted her and drove her to utter desperation sometimes. “I suppose you have some good reason for wearing them?” “I have a reason, but I don’t know if it is a good one,” she replied in tones sharp from nervousness. “You wear them under advice, I imagine?” “No, really my own idea,” she said, airily. “Shall I take them off? Tell me to, and I will!” Her voice was trembling, her hands were twitching with the overmastering desire to do away, once for all, with this absurd barrier between them. A woman, shorn of her powers, mulcted of her charm, handicapped, at the very moment when she needed the full arsenal of her feminine armoury! That was what she was, and his imperturbability irritated her vanity, and made it, for the moment, paramount. She realized the full gravity of the situation, she felt it a turning point, she had attached an almost fetish-like importance to the insignia of her virtuous resolutions, but in the wild desire to assert her womanhood that mastered her now, she was prepared to abandon anything and everything that stood in the way of its accomplishment. “Shall I take them off? Shall I?” was her irresponsible cry. “You have advised me to. Remember that.” There was a pause--a century of vital emotion for her, the mere opportunity for an added touch of the brush on to a ticklish corner of his foreground for the painter. “Did I?” he asked, carelessly, as she deliberately laid aside the spectacles, and looked him full in the face. But the heavens did not fall or the solid earth fail, and with the single unconcerned remark: “I should not have said that your eyes were at all weak!” the painter continued tranquilly to deposit brushes full of diluted sepia and water on to his drawing. There were tears in her eyes next time she raised them. CHAPTER VI Mrs. Elles never put the spectacles on again. They had made no difference--except to herself. And further intimacy with Rivers convinced her that any such artificial safeguards against flirtation were quite unnecessary.