‘I know what you’re going to say — he was a very good man. But I know it better than any one, because I gave him more chance to show it. In that I think I was a good wife.’ Mrs Touchett added that at the end her husband apparently recognised the fact. ‘He has treated me most liberally,’ she said; ‘I won’t say more liberally than I expected, because I didn’t expect. You know that as a general thing I don’t expect. But he chose, I presume, to recognise the fact that though I lived much abroad and mingled — you may say freely — in foreign life, I never exhibited the smallest preference for any one else.’

‘For any one but yourself,” Madame Merle mentally observed; but the reflexion was perfectly inaudible.

‘I never sacrificed my husband to another,’ Mrs Touchett continued with her stout curtness.

‘Oh, no,’ thought Madame Merle, ‘you never did anything for another!’

[...] She was always at home on Sunday afternoons and surrounded by sympathetic compatriots, usually the same. In fact she was at home at all times, and reproduced with wondrous truth in her well-cushioned little corner of the brilliant city, the domestic tone of her native Baltimore. This reduced Mr Luce, her worthy husband, a tall, lean, grizzled well-brushed gentleman who wore a gold eyeglass and carried his hat a little too much on the back of his head, to mere platonic praise of the ‘distractions’ of Paris — they were his great word — since you would never have guessed from what cares he escaped to them. One of them was that he went every day to the American banker’s, where he found a post-office that was almost as sociable and colloquial an institution as in an American country town. He passed an hour (in fine weather) in a chair in the Champs Elysées, and he dined uncommonly well at his own table, seated above a waxed floor which it was Mrs Luce’s happiness to believe had a finer polish than any other in the French capital. Occasionally he dined with a friend or two at the Café Anglais, where his talent for ordering a dinner was a source of felicity to his companions and an object of admiration even to the head-waiter of the establishment. These were his only known pastimes, but they had beguiled his hours for upwards of half a century, and they doubtless justified his frequent declaration that there was no place like Paris. In no other place, on these terms, could Mr Luce flatter himself that he was enjoying life. There was nothing like Paris, but it must be confessed that Mr Luce thought less highly of this scene of his dissipations than in earlier days. In the list of his resources his political reflections should not be omitted, for they were doubtless the animating principle of many hours that superficially seemed vacant. Like many of his fellow colonists Mr Luce was a high — or rather a deep — conservative, and gave no countenance to the government lately established in France. He had no faith in its duration and would assure you from year to year that its end was close at hand. “They want to be kept down, sir, to be kept down; nothing but the strong hand - the iron heel — will do for them,’ he would frequently say of the French people; and his ideal of a fine showy clever rule was that of the superseded Empire. ‘Paris is much less attractive than in the days of the Emperor; he knew how to make a city pleasant,’ Mr Luce had often remarked to Mrs Touchett, who was quite of his own way of thinking and wished to know what one had crossed that odious Atlantic for but to get away from republics.

‘Why, madam, sitting in the Champs Elysées, opposite to the Palace of Industry, I’ve seen the court-carriages from the Tuileries pass up and down as many as seven times a day. I remember one occasion when they went as high as nine. What do you see now? It’s no use talking, the style’s all gone. Napoleon knew what the French people want, and there’ll be a dark cloud over Paris, our Paris, till they get the Empire back again.'

‘I hope it won’t ruin you; but it will certainly confirm your dangerous tendencies.’

‘Do you mean the love of luxury — of extravagance?’

‘No, no,’ said Henrietta; ‘I mean your exposure on the moral side. I approve of luxury; I think we ought to be as elegant as possible. Look at the luxury of our western cities; I’ve seen nothing over here to compare with it. I hope you’ll never become grossly sensual; but I’m not afraid of that. The peril for you is that you live too much in the world of your own dreams. You’re not enough in contact with reality — with the toiling, striving, suffering, I may even say sinning, world that surrounds you. You’re too fastidious; you’ve too many graceful illusions. Your newly-acquired thousands will shut you up more and more to the society of a few selfish and heartless people who will be interested in keeping them up.’

‘I differ with Miss Stackpole,’ Ralph went on more gravely.
‘I think it very good for you to have means.’

Isabel looked at him with serious eyes. ‘I wonder whether
you know what’s good for me — or whether you care.’

‘If I know depend upon it I care. Shall I tell you what it is?
Not to torment yourself.’

‘Not to torment you, I suppose you mean.’

“You can’t do that; I'm proof. Take things more easily.
Don’t ask yourself so much whether this or that is good for
you. Don’t question your conscience so much — it will get out
of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions.
Don’t try so much to form your character — it’s like trying to
pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best, and
your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for
you; the exceptions are very rare, and a comfortable income’s
not one of them.’ Ralph paused, smiling; Isabel had listened
quickly. “You’ve too much power of thought — above all too
much conscience,’ Ralph added. ‘It’s out of all reason, the number of things you think wrong. Put back your watch. Diet
your fever. Spread your wings; rise above the ground. It’s
never wrong to do that.'

Lord Warburton went to the box, where Isabel’s welcome
was as to a friend so honourably old that he vaguely asked
himself what queer temporal province she was annexing. [...]

‘I hope it may never be my fortune to fail to gratify my hus-
band’s.’

At these words a sudden passion leaped to Ralph’s lips.
‘Ah, that’s wilful, that’s unworthy of you! You were not meant
to be measured in that way — you were meant for something
better than to keep guard over the sensibilities of a sterile
dilettante!'

[...] Still, who could say what men ever were looking
for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased
them only when they saw it. No theory was valid in such mat-
ters, and nothing was more unaccountable or more natural
than anything else. If he had cared for her it might seem odd
he should care for Pansy, who was so different; but he had not
cared for her so much as he had supposed. Or if he had, he
had completely got over it, and it was natural that, as that
affair had failed, he should think something of quite another
sort might succeed. [...]

Such a resolution, however, brought her this evening but little peace, for her soul was haunted with terrors which crowded to the foreground of thought as quickly as a place was made for them. What had suddenly set them into livelier motion she hardly knew, unless it were the strange impression she had received in the afternoon of her husband’s being in more direct communication with Madame Merle than she suspected. That impression came back to her from time to time, and now she wondered it had never come before. Besides this, her short interview with Osmond half an hour ago was a striking example of his faculty for making everything wither that he touched, spoiling everything for her that he looked at. It was all very well to undertake to give him a proof of loyalty; the real fact was that the knowledge of his expecting a thing raised a presumption against it. It was as if he had had the evil eye; as if his presence were a blight and his favour a misfortune. Was the fault in himself, or only in the deep mistrust she had conceived for him? This mistrust was now the clearest result of their short married life; a gulf had opened between them over which they looked at each other with eyes that were on either side a declaration of the deception suffered. It was a strange opposition, of the like of which she had never dreamed — an opposition in which the vital principle of the one was a thing of contempt to the other. It was not her fault — she had practised no deception; she had only admired and believed. She had taken all the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end. Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and where it served to deepen the feeling of failure. It was her deep distrust of her husband — this was what darkened the world. That is a sentiment easily indicated, but not so easily explained, and so composite in its character that much time and still more suffering had been needed to bring it to its actual perfection. Suffering, with Isabel, was an active condition; it was not a chill, a stupor, a despair; it was a passion of thought, of speculation, of response to every pressure. She flattered herself that she had kept her failing faith to herself, however, — that no one suspected it but Osmond. Oh, he knew it, and there were times when she thought he enjoyed it. It had come gradually — it was not till the first year of their life together, so admirably intimate at first, had closed that she had taken the alarm. Then the shadows had begun to gather; it was as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one. The dusk at first was vague and thin, and she could still see her way in it. But it steadily deepened, and if now and again it had occasionally lifted there were certain corners of her prospect that were impenetrably black. These shadows were not an emanation from her own mind: she was very sure of that; she had done her best to be just and temperate, to see only the truth. They were a part, they were a kind of creation and consequence, of her husband’s very presence. They were not his misdeeds, his turpitudes; she accused him of nothing — that is but of one thing, which was not a crime. She knew of no wrong he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel: she simply believed he hated her. That was all she accused him of, and the miserable part of it was precisely that it was not a crime, for against a crime she might have found redress. He had discovered that she was so different, that she was not what he had believed she would prove to be. He had thought at first he could change her, and she had done her best to be what he would like. But she was, after all, herself — she couldn’t help that; and now there was no use pretending, wearing a mask or a dress, for he knew her and had made up his mind. She was not afraid of him; she had no apprehension he would hurt her; for the ill-will he bore her was not of that sort. He would if possible never give her a pretext, never put himself in the wrong. Isabel, scanning the future with dry, fixed eyes, saw that he would have the better of her there. She would give him many pretexts, she would often put herself in the wrong. There were times when she almost pitied him; for if she had not deceived him in intention she understood how completely she must have done so in fact. She had effaced herself when he first knew her; she had made herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was. It was because she had been under the extraordinary charm that he, on his side, had taken pains to put forth. He was not changed; he had not disguised himself, during the year of his courtship, any more than she. But she had seen only half his nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow of the earth. She saw the full moon now — she saw the whole man. She had kept still, as it were, so that he should have a free field, and yet in spite of this she had mistaken a part for the whole.

[...] She remembered perfectly the first sign he had given of it — it had been like a bell that was to ring up the curtain upon the real drama of their life. He said to her one day that she had too many ideas and that she must get rid of them. He had told her that already, before their marriage; but then she had not noticed it: it had come back to her only afterwards. This time she might well have noticed it, because he had really meant it. The words had been nothing superficially; but when in the light of deepening experience she had looked into them they had then appeared portentous. He had really meant it — he would have liked her to have nothing of her own but her pretty appearance. She had known she had too many ideas; she had more even than he had supposed, many more than she had expressed to him when he had asked her to marry him. Yes, she had been hypocritical; she had liked him so much. She had too many ideas for herself; but that was just what one married for, to share them with some one else. One couldn’t pluck them up by the roots, though of course one might suppress them, be careful not to utter them. It had not been this, however, his objecting to her opinions; this had been nothing. She had no opinions — none that she would not have been eager to sacrifice in the satisfaction of feeling herself loved for it. What he had meant had been the whole thing — her character, the way she felt, the way she judged. This was what she had kept in reserve; this was what he had not known until he had found himself — with the door closed behind, as it were — set down face to face with it. She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offence. Heaven knew that now at least it was a very humble, accommodating way! The strange thing was that she should not have suspected from the first that his own had been so different. She had thought it so large, so enlightened, so perfectly that of an honest man and a gentleman. Hadn’t he as- sured her that he had no superstitions, no dull limitations, no prejudices that had lost their freshness? Hadn’t he all the appearance of a man living in the open air of the world, indifferent to small considerations, caring only for truth and knowledge and believing that two intelligent people ought to look for them together and, whether they found them or not, find at least some happiness in the search? He had told her he loved the conventional; but there was a sense in which this seemed a noble declaration. In that sense, that of the love of harmony and order and decency and of all the stately offices of life, she went with him freely, and his warning had contained nothing ominous. But when, as the months had elapsed, she had followed him further and he had led her into the mansion of his own habitation, then, then she had seen where she really was.

Then it was that her husband’s personality, touched as it never had been, stepped forth and stood erect. The things she had said were answered only by his scorn, and she could see he was ineffably ashamed of her. What did he think of her — that she was base, vulgar, ignoble? He at least knew now that she had no traditions! It had not been in his prevision of things that she should reveal such flatness; her sentiments were worthy of a radical newspaper or a Unitarian preacher. The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his — attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park. He would rake the soil gently and water the flowers; he would weed the beds and gather an occasional nosegay. It would be a pretty piece of property for a proprietor already far-reaching. He didn’t wish her to be stupid. On the contrary, it was because she was clever that she had pleased him. But he expected her intelligence to operate altogether in his favour, and so far from desiring her mind to be a blank he had flattered himself that it would be richly receptive. He had expected his wife to feel with him and for him, to enter into his opinions, his ambitions, his preferences; and Isabel was obliged to confess that this was no great insolence on the part of a man so accomplished and a husband originally at least so tender. But there were certain things she could never take in. To begin with, they were hideously unclean. She was not a daughter of the Puritans, but for all that she believed in such a thing as chastity and even as decency. It would appear that Osmond was far from doing anything of the sort: some of his traditions made her push back her skirts. Did all women have lovers? Did they all lie and even the best have their price? Were there only three or four that didn’t deceive their husbands? When Isabel heard such things she felt a greater scorn for them than for the gossip of a village parlour — a scorn that kept its freshness in a very tainted air. There was the taint of her sister-in-law: did her husband judge only by the Countess Gemini? This lady very often lied, and she had practised deceptions that were not simply verbal. It was enough to find these facts assumed among Osmond’s traditions — it was enough without giving them such a general extension. It was her scorn of his assumptions, it was this that made him draw himself up. He had plenty of contempt, and it was proper his wife should be as well furnished; but that she should turn the hot light of her disdain upon his own conception of things — this was a danger he had not allowed for. He believed he should have regulated her emotions before she came to it; and Isabel could easily imagine how his ears had scorched on his discovering he had been too confident. When one had a wife who gave one that sensation there was nothing left but to hate her.