'No, I don’t. I think Pansy would do wonderfully well to marry you, and I don’t know who should know it better than you. But you’re not in love.’

‘Ah, yes I am, Mrs Osmond!’

Isabel shook her head. ‘You like to think you are while you sit here with me. But that’s not how you strike me.’

‘I'm not like the young man in the doorway. I admit that. But what makes it so unnatural? Could any one in the world be more loveable than Miss Osmond?’

‘No one, possibly. But love has nothing to do with good reasons.’

‘I don’t agree with you. I’m delighted to have good reasons.’

‘Of course you are. If you were really in love you wouldn’t care a straw for them.’

‘Ah, really in love — really in love!’ Lord Warburton exclaimed, folding his arms, leaning back his head and stretch- ing himself a little. ‘You must remember that I’m forty-two years old. I won’t pretend I’m as I once was.’

THE COUNTESS bored, in her own GEMINI was XLIV often phrase, to extinction. extremely bored — She had not been extinguished, however, and she struggled bravely enough with her destiny, which had been to marry an unaccommodating Florentine who insisted upon living in his native town, where he enjoyed such consideration as might attach to a gentleman whose talent for losing at cards had not the merit of being incidental to an obliging disposition. The Count Gemini was not liked even by those who won from him; and he bore a name which, having a measurable value in Florence, was, like the local coin of the old Italian states, without currency in other parts of the peninsula. In Rome he was simply avery dull Florentine, and it is not remarkable that he should not have cared to pay frequent visits to a place where, to carry it off, his dullness needed more explanation than was convenient. [...]

[...] And then she lived, with Mrs Osmond, under the influence of a pleasant surprise; she was constantly expecting that Isabel would ‘look down’ on her, and she as constantly saw this operation postponed. She asked herself when it would begin, like fire-works, or Lent, or the opera season; not that she cared much, but she wondered what kept it in abeyance. Her sister-in-law regarded her with none but level glances and expressed for the poor Countess as little contempt as admiration. In reality Isabel would as soon have thought of despising her as of passing a moral judgement on a grasshopper. She was not indifferent to her husband’s sister, however; she was rather a little afraid of her. She wondered at her; she thought her very extraordinary. The Countess seemed to her to have no soul; she was like a bright rare shell, with a polished surface and a remarkably pink lip, in which something would rattle when you shook it. This rattle was apparently the Countess’s spiritual principle, a little loose nut that tumbled about inside of her. She was too odd for disdain, too anomalous for comparisons. [...]

‘He does nothing. But he doesn’t like me.’

‘He’s very hard to please!’ cried Miss Stackpole. ‘Why don’t you leave him?’

‘I can’t change that way,’ Isabel said.

‘Why not, I should like to know? You won’t confess that you’ve made a mistake. You’re too proud.’

‘I don’t know whether I’m too proud. But I can’t publish my mistake. I don’t think that’s decent. I'd much rather die.’

“You won’t think so always,’ said Henrietta.

‘I don’t know what great unhappiness might bring me to; but it seems to me I shall always be ashamed. One must accept one’s deeds. I married him before all the world; I was perfectly free; it was impossible to do anything more deliberate. One can’t change that way,’ Isabel repeated.

Isabel took a drive alone that afternoon; she wished to be far away, under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage and tread upon the daisies. She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter’s day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers. There was no gentler nor less consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of worshippers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could not have felt more intimately the sugges- tiveness of these objects nor have been more liable at such ~ moments to a spiritual visitation. [...]

AS THE Countess Gemini was not acquainted with the
ancient monuments Isabel occasionally offered to introduce
her to these interesting relics and to give their afternoon drive
an antiquarian aim. The Countess, who profesed to think her
sister-in-law a prodigy of learning, never made an objection,
and gazed at masses of Roman brickwork as patiently as if
they had been mounds of modern drapery. [...]

[...] ‘I’ve an ideal of what my wife should do and should not do. She should not travel across Europe alone, in defiance of my deepest desire, to sit at the bedside of other men. Your cousin’s nothing to you; he’s nothing to us. You smile most expressively when I talk about us, but I assure you that we, we, Mrs Osmond, is all I know. I take our marriage seriously; you appear to have found a way of not doing so. I’m not aware that we’re divorced or separated; for me we’re indissolubly united. You are nearer to me than any human creature, and I’m nearer to you. It may be a disagreeable proximity; it’s one, at any rate, of our own deliberate making. You don’t like to be reminded of that, I know; but I’m perfectly willing, because — because —’ And he paused a moment, looking as if he had something to say which would be very much to the point. ‘Because I think we should accept the consequences of our actions, and what I value most in life is the honour of a thing!’

[...] Deep in her soul — deeper than any appetite for renunciation — was the sense that life would be her business for a long time to come. And at moments there was something inspiring, almost enlivening, in the conviction. It was a proof of strength — it was a proof she should some day be happy again. It couldn’t be she was to live only to suffer; she was still young, after all, and a great many things might happen to her yet. To live only to suffer — only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged — it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn’t all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn’t it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer? It involved then perhaps an admission that one had a certain grossness; but Isabel recognised, as it passed before her eyes, the quick vague shadow of a long future. She should never escape; she should last to the end. Then the middle years wrapped her about again and the grey curtain of her indifference closed her in.

At first, in rejoinder to what she had said, it seemed to her that he would break out into greater violence. But after an instant he was perfectly quiet; he wished to prove he was sane, that he had reasoned it all out. ‘I want to prevent that, and I think I may, if you’ll only for once listen to me. It’s too monstrous of you to think of sinking back into that misery, of going to open your mouth to that poisoned air. It’s you that are out of your mind. Trust me as if I had the care of you. Why shouldn’t we be happy — when it’s here before us, when it’s so easy? I’m yours for ever — for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. What have you to care about? You’ve no children; that perhaps would be an obstacle. As it is you’ve nothing to consider. You must save what you can of your life; you mustn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part. It would be an insult to you to assume that you care for the look of the thing, for what people will say, for the bottomless idiocy of the world. We’ve nothing to do with all that; we’re quite out of it; we look at things as they are. You took the great step in coming away; the next is nothing; it’s the natural one. I swear, as I stand here, that a woman deliberately made to suffer is justified in anything in life — in going down into the streets if that will help her! I know how you suffer, and that’s why I’m here. We can do absolutely as we please; to whom under the sun do we owe anything? What is it that holds us, what is it that has the smallest right to interfere in such a question as this? Such a question is between ourselves — and to say that is to settle it! Were we born to rot in our misery — were we born to be afraid? I never knew you afraid! If you’ll only trust me, how little you will be disappointed! The world’s all before us — and the world’s very big. I know something about that.’

[...] The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist’s prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its ability to ‘grow’ with due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality. That element is but another name for the more or less close connexion of the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with some sincere experience. By which, at the same time, of course, one is far from contending that this enveloping air of the artist’s humanity — which gives the last touch to the worth of the work — is not a widely and wondrously varying element; being on one occasion a rich and magnificent medium and on another a comparatively poor and un- generous one. Here we get exactly the high price of the novel as a literary form — its power not only, while preserving that form with closeness, to range through ail the differences of the individual relation to its general subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook on life, of disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions that are never the same from man to man (or, so far as that goes, from man to woman), but positively to appear more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould.