Bessie by means of fingers or ears could get at the meaning of a book. There is a third and quicker way, she is told, but how except through fingers and ears can she realise it? Up to a certain point she has gone hand in hand with sisters and brothers; if not indeed in advance of them. She reaches that point full of ardour and enthusiasm, eager to learn, to live, to work, and suddenly the way is barred. Blindness stands there as with a drawn sword, and she can go no farther.
The limitations of her condition touched her first on the side of pleasure. She could join in a quadrille at Chichester, could dine at the palace when there was a party, and "what she was to take" had been arranged in the morning. But in London there were no balls for her, no dining out except with a few very old friends, no possibility of including her in the rapid whirl of London life. She had many disappointments, and tried hard to conceal them. Only once, says a sister, did she see a swift look of passing pain, when telling Bessie about a ball from which in the early morning she had returned. It was there for an instant, recognised by the loving and beloved sister, but at once thrust away, and Bessie threw herself with more than ordinary interest into the account of the pleasures of the evening. Another sister tells how about this time Bessie began "to want to do impossible things," to go out alone in London, to go alone in a cab, and if she might not go alone, she wished to give her own orders to the cabman.
Reading and writing depended largely on the time that others could give her. Writing was a slow and laborious process. She could write in the ordinary way, but to do so she had to remember not the form of a letter but the movements of her own hand. Such writing had to be looked over in case a word should be unintelligible, and she could therefore have no private correspondents. Girls in Oxford and at Chichester had plenty of spare time, but when the family was divided, and those in London or at Chichester had the duties of their position as well as its pleasures to attend to, there grew up almost insensibly a different order of things. In childhood and youth the blind daughter was the centre of all activity and pleasure; but the blind woman inevitably recedes more and more. She no longer leads; she can with difficulty follow; and at a distance which increases as the years go on.