Half an hour ago the mistress of the house,
Isabella Tyson, had gone down the grass path in her thin summer dress, carrying
a basket, and had vanished, sliced off by the gilt rim of the looking-glass.
She had gone presumably into the lower garden to pick flowers; or as it seemed
more natural to suppose, to pick something light and fantastic and leafy and trailing,
travellers' joy, or one of those elegant sprays of convolvulus that twine round
ugly walls and burst here and there into white and violet blossoms. She
suggested the fantastic and the tremulous convolvulus rather than the upright
aster, the starched zinnia, or her own burning roses alight like lamps on the
straight posts of their rose trees. The comparison showed how very little,
after all these years, one knew about her; for it is impossible that any woman
of flesh and blood of fifty-five or sixty should be really a wreath or a
tendril. Such comparisons are worse than idle and superficial--they are cruel
even, for they come like the convolvulus itself
trembling between one's eyes and the truth. There must be truth; there must be
a wall.
“The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection”
(CSF 222)
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