Emma opened her eyes. She was sitting on the bench with her head thrown back and the sun, which she had felt so often, was shining through gaps in the leaves of the tree above. She could see what they called colour. But it wasn't like anything they had described. She looked first at the sun. But she had to look away from it, the all-beautiful, all-glorious sun, before she could even think of what it was like. It was like looking at God, too dazzling. In that one instant colour came so crowding in on her that she closed her eyes again.

She clenched her fists, remaining very still; but her heart raced, as she thought,‘It's happened! It's happened! Oh God! Thank you! It's happened!’ And yet was it possible? Could such a thing happen?

Emma opened her right eye just a fraction, so that she could see between her eyelashes, and it was true. There was the green of grass, sewn with buttercups and dandelions like brass buttons, and the white petals and yellow centres of daisies.

A sudden chill of fear struck her and she closed her eyes again. This was very, very dangerous. She had read descriptions of colour in books, and people had told her what things looked like in colour, but none of them had conveyed to her even the tiniest fraction of what she had already seen was the most miraculous and beautiful thing in the whole world, the infinitely varied glory of colour. There was not one green but tens of thousands of different shades of green; and when they said grass was green, it was also yellow and brown and nearly black in places, and in others nearly white.

Perhaps people who had seen colour all their lives had never noticed that, or had just grown lazy about looking, calling grass green because it was more green than it was any other colour. And then she would be tempted to tell them that they had never really looked at colour, and they would say ‘How do you know?’ They would laugh and say ‘You're colour-blind and yet you pretend to know!’ She tried to remember what General Principle* had said.