The ime I saw her, Miss Winter looked different. She closed her eyes wearily, and it took her lohan usual to jure the past and begin to speak. While she gathered the threads, I watched her and noticed that she had left off her false eyelashes. There was the habitual purple eye shadow, the sweeping line of black. But without the spider lashes, she had the ued appearance of a child who had been playing in her mother』s makeup box.
Things weren』t as Hester and the doctor expected. They were prepared for an Adeline who would rant and rage and kid fight. As for Emmelihey were ting on her affe for Hester to recile her to her twin』s sudden absehey were expeg, in short, the same girls they had before, only separate where they had been together. And so, initially, they were surprised by the twins』 collapse into a pair of lifeless rag dolls.
Not quite lifeless. The blood tio circulate, sluggishly, in their veins. They swallowed the soup that ooned into their mouths by in one house the Missus, iher the doctor』s wife. But swallowing is a reflex, and they had no appetite. Their eyes, open during the day, were unseeing, and at night, though their eyes closed, they had not the tranquility of sleep. They were apart; they were alohey were in a kind of limbo. They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.
Did the stists doubt themselves? Stop and wonder whether they were doing the right thing? Did the lolling, unscious figures of the twins cast a shadow over their beautiful project? They were not willfully cruel, you know. Only foolish. Misguided by their learning, their ambition, their own self-deceiving blindness.
The doctor carried out tests. Hester observed. And they met every day, to pare o discuss what at first they optimistically called progress. Behind the doctor』s desk, or in the Angelfield library, they sat together, heads bent over papers on which were recorded every detail of the girls』 lives. Behavior, diet, sleep. They puzzled over absent appetites, the propensity to sleep all the time—that sleep which was not sleep. They proposed theories to at for the ges iwins. The experiment was not going as well as they had expected, had begun in fact disastrously, but the two stists skirted around the possibility that they might be doing harm, preferring to retain the belief that together they could work a miracle.
The doctor derived great satisfa from the y of w for the first time in decades with a stifid of the highest order. He marveled at his protegee』s ability to grasp a principle one minute and to apply it with professional inality and insight the . Before long he admitted to himself that she was more a colleague than a protegee. Aer was thrilled to find that at long last her mind was adequately nourished and challenged. She came out of their daily meetings aglow with excitement and pleasure. So their blindness was only natural. How could they be expected to uand that what was doing them such good could be doing such great harm to the children in their care? Unless perhaps, in the evenings, each sitting in solitude to write up the day』s hey might individually have raised their eyes to the unmoving, dead-eyed child in a chair in the er a a doubt cross their minds. Perhaps. But if they did, they did not record it n their notes, did not mention it to the other.
So depe did the pair bee on their joint uaking that hey quite failed to see that the grand project was making