As Figes tells it, Lily is the person who sees the world most like the way Monet hopes to paint it. She is the one who pays the most attention to the light—and to the choices a person makes, or might make, when he or she perceives an object. Here she is looking at a red balloon:

Looking through it was the secret, she decided, if you just looked at it the balloon seemed rather dull, a matte surface which would begin to wrinkle, its navel tied with twine. But its red transparency changed everything, the quality of vision, like closing her eyes against the sunlight, and seeing bright red through the lids.

This is quite similar to Monet’s constant thoughts about how he might push through “the bright skin of things.” He knows that if he can break through “the shimmering envelope” to “look through things” he might “show how light and those things it illumines are both transubstantiate, both tenuous.” This is the point of his labors and investment in the garden, and of the endless labors at the easel. Through a great deal of conscious effort and planning, and the sculpting of nature into something considerably more tame and reliable, Monet hoped to perceive something true about the world, or at least some small patches of it, without self-consciousness, as a child might.