looking at me. Am I growing older or is it something else? I feel ... I feel ... my heart is beating too hard. I am not warm. What is it?" She glanced from one of them to the other. The mysteries had all vanished from her face. It was as easy to read as that of a man in a shelter when a bomb is coming.
"What is it?" she repeated.
"It is called Fear," said Weston's mouth. Then the creature turned its face full on Ransom and grinned.
"Fear," she said. "This is Fear," pondering the discovery; then, with abrupt finality, "I do not like it."
"It will go away," said the Un-man, when Ransom interrupted.
"It will never go away if you do what he wishes. It is into more and more fear that he is leading you."
"It is," said the Un-man, "into the great waves and through them and beyond. Now that you know Fear, you see that it must be you who shall taste it on behalf of your race. You know the King will not. You do not wish him to. But there is no cause for fear in this little thing: rather for joy. What is fearful in it?"
"Things being two when they are one," replied the Lady decisively. "That thing" (she pointed at the mirror) "is me and not me."
"But if you do not look you will never know how beautiful you are."
"It comes into my mind, Stranger," she answered, "that a fruit does not eat itself, and a man cannot be together with himself."
"A fruit cannot do that because it is only a fruit," said the Un-man. "But we can do it. We call this thing a mirror. A man can love himself, and be together with himself. That is what it means to be a man or a woman - to walk alongside oneself as if one were a second person and to delight in one's own beauty. Mirrors were made to teach this art."
"Is it a good?" said the Lady. "No," said Ransom.
"How can you find out without trying?" said the Un-man. "If you try it and it is not good," said Ransom, "how do you know whether you will be able to stop doing it?"
"I am walking alongside myself already," said the Lady. "But I do not yet know what I look like. If I have become two I had better know what the other is. As for you, Piebald, one look will show me this woman's face and why should I look more than once?"
She took the mirror, timidly but firmly, from the Un-man and looked into it in silence for the better part of a minute. Then she let it sink and stood holding it at her side.
"It is very strange," she said at last.
"It is very beautiful," said the Un-man. "Do you not think so?"
"Yes. "
"But you have not ,yet found what you set out to find."
"What was that? I have forgotten."
"Whether the robe of feathers made you more beautiful or less."
"I saw only a face."
"Hold it further away and you will see the whole of the alongside woman - the other who is yourself. Or no - I will hold it."
The commonplace suggestions of the scene became grotesque at this stage. She looked at herself first with the robe, then without it, then with it again; finally she decided against it and threw it away. The Un-man picked it up.
"Will you not keep it?" he said; "you might wish to carry it on some days even if you do not wish for it on all days."
"Keep it?" she asked, not clearly understanding.
"I had forgotten," said the Un-man. "I had forgotten that you would not live on the Fixed Land nor build a house nor in any way become mistress of your own days. Keeping means putting a thing where you know you can always find it again, and where rain, and beasts, and other people cannot reach it. I would give you this mirror to keep. It would be the Queen's mirror, a gift brought into the world from Deep Heaven: the other women would not have it. But you have reminded me. There can be no gifts, no keeping, no foresight while you live as you do - from day to day, like the beasts."
But the Lady did not appear to be listening to him. She stood like one almost dazed with the richness of a day-dream. She did not look in the least like a woman who