It was certainly strange beyond all strangeness, and I shall not
take up space with attempting to explain it, that whereas in all
these other lines of research we had to deal with phantoms and dust,
the mere echoes of echoes, the one living source of information
that had lingered on into our time had been unheeded by us.
Every one of Aspern's contemporaries had, according to
our belief, passed away; we had not been able to look into
a single pair of eyes into which his had looked or to feel
a transmitted contact in any aged hand that his had touched.
Most dead of all did poor Miss Bordereau appear, and yet she
alone had survived. We exhausted in the course of months
our wonder that we had not found her out sooner, and the
substance of our explanation was that she had kept so quiet.
The poor lady on the whole had had reason for doing so.
But it was a revelation to us that it was possible to keep
so quiet as that in the latter half of the nineteenth century--
the age of newspapers and telegrams and photographs and interviewers.
And she had taken no great trouble about it either:
she had not hidden herself away in an undiscoverable hole;
she had boldly settled down in a city of exhibition.
The only secret of her safety that we could perceive was that
Venice contained so many curiosities that were greater than she.
And then accident had somehow favored her, as was shown
for example in the fact that Mrs. Prest had never happened
to mention her to me, though I had spent three weeks
in Venice--under her nose, as it were--five years before.
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