It seemed at first, as she walked by the canal, like a blue gem, huge and beautiful, or an eye gazing heavenward, startlingly clear and bright in the dust; but as she stooped to pick it up its color shifted abruptly, fleeing from blue to dark. And as she lifted it the color shifted again and she saw that it was a small fragment of mirror, roughly triangular, roughly equilateral. She held it up to her face between thumb and forefinger, smiling at what she had fancied it to be, then suddenly cried out in surprise. The eye that looked out at her from its silver triangle was not her own: the iris was bright where hers was dull, the lashes long where hers were meagre, the lid moist where hers was dry, though lid lowered and pupil flexed in seeming coordination with hers, eye examining eye, startled at what it saw.
“Witchcraft,” she muttered, but her hand refused to drop or fling the thing away. She held it out at arm’s-length, drew it back, tilted the fragment one way and another, experimenting to find the distance at which she could best see the face around the eye. And the face was not hers, or rather was hers as might have been: paler, smoother, unlined and unwithered. More beautiful. The mouth in the mirror smiled as she thought this, but hers was smiling too. The face was not hers but its expressions were hers, or almost, for the other’s smile had been pitying and hers had been rueful.
“More beautiful thou art than I,” she murmured to the face, and saw its lips move simultaneously with the same words, seemingly, though they could not have the same significance. “Beautiful” in her tongue must signify “plain” — already she thought of the reflection as another, not herself.
“Who art thou?” she said thereto, and saw its lips asking her the same question.
“I am Arisna,” she replied, as the reflection told her the same, seemingly. Arisna, Arisna, she thought. I and thou, thou and I. She shifted the fragment, tilting it left, right, up, down, and saw that the second Arisna was dressed richly in red velvet, with a string of emeralds around her neck, where she had grey linen and snail-shells strung on flax, and that her double-not-double was standing in a world like-but-not-like hers: its earth green where hers was dust-whelmed, its canal full and liliaceous where hers was parched and dead, its sky blue where hers was grey.
Weeping for longing of the other’s world, she re-found the second Arisna’s face, and saw her double-not-double weeping too, for sadness of her double-not-double’s plight. Then she cried out again in surprise and this time dropped the fragment, for water was trickling therefrom: the water of her double-not-double’s tears. It shattered as it hit the earth, strewing the hardness thereof with fragments of fragments, blue with that kinder sky of the other girl’s world. But each fragment of the fragment continued to leak tears, moistening the earth whereon it lay. She wept herself over the loss of the fragment, over the thought that never again would she see her double-not-double’s beautiful face, but when her tears were dry, leaving white tracks on her cheeks, the fragments-of-fragment continued to leak, lying in a small pool now whose water — she cupped a handful and tasted it cautiously, then drank freely — was sweet and unsalty. Soon, widening faster by the heartbeat, it would release a rill of itself canal-ward, pouring to the lip thereof and over, endlessly.