There were half-a-dozen yellow chrysanthemums in a dull green jar on a Buhl chiffonier. The slanting November sunshine fell on them, and threw against the white wall a shadow of them. It was a shadow transfigured, intricate yet vague, mysterious, beautiful exceedingly.
I should never have noticed it if she had not looked at it with such intentness. For a moment I saw it with her eyes. I was touched; I hardly knew why. All the apathy was gone from her face. There was passion in it. She looked entirely exhausted, and yet it was the first time I had seen her really alive.
The sunshine went out suddenly, and she sighed.
"You may get up to-morrow, and go downstairs," I said. "It is dull for you alone up here."
Was she, like so many women, "contrary?" Always opposing the suggestions of others, never willing to fall in with family arrangements.
"Don't you want to see the goldfish?" I hazarded, speaking as if to a child. "He must be lonely now Mrs. Robinson is laid up. And who will give him his crumbs?"
"No, I don't want to see him," she said passionately. "I never look at him if I can help it. Oh Dr. Giles, everyone seems to shut their eyes who comes into this house--everyone--but don't you see how dreadful it is to be a prisoner?"
She looked at me with timid despairing eyes, which yet had a flicker of hope in them. I patted her hand gently, and found she still had a little fever.
"But he gets plenty of crumbs," I said soothingly, "and it is a nice aquarium with fresh water running through all the time. I think he is a very lucky goldfish."
She looked fixedly at me, and the faint colour in her cheeks faded, the imploring look vanished from her eyes.
"That is what Mrs. Robinson says," she said with a quivering lip, and I perceived that I was relegated to the same category in her mind as her mother-in-law.
She withdrew her thin hand and retreated once more behind the frail bastion of silence from which she had looked out at me for all these months; from which she had for one moment emerged, only to creep back to its forlorn shelter.
A few days later Mrs. Robinson was convalescent, sitting up in bed in a garish cap festooned with cherry-coloured ribbons, and a silk wadded jacket to match. I questioned her about her daughter-in-law, in whom for the first time I felt interested. It needed no acumen on my part to draw forth the whole of Blanche's short history. One slight question was all that was necessary to turn on the cock of Mrs. Robinson's confidences. The stream gushed forth at once, it overflowed, it could hardly be turned off again. I was drenched.