Mrs Ludlow was the eldest of the three sisters, and was usually thought the most sensible; the classification being in general that Lilian was the practical one, Edith the beauty and Isabel the ‘intellectual’ superior. Mrs Keyes, the second of the group, was the wife of an officer of the United States Engineers, and as our history is not further concerned with her it will suffice that she was indeed very pretty and that she formed the ornament of those military stations, chiefly in the unfashionable West, to which, to her deep chagrin, her husband was successively relegated. [...]

[...] Nineteen persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself) pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two; but the twentieth, besides reversing this judgement, had the entertainment of thinking all the others esthetic vulgarians. Isabel had in the depths of her nature an even more unquenchable desire to please than Edith; but the depths of this young lady’s nature were a very out-of-the-way place, between which and the surface communication was interrupted by a dozen capricious forces. She saw the young men who came in large numbers to see her sister; but as a general thing they were afraid of her; they had a belief that some special preparation was required for talking with her. Her reputation of reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic; it was supposed to engender difficult questions and to keep the conversation at a low temperature. The poor girl liked to be thought clever but she hated to be thought bookish; she used to read in secret and, though her memory was excellent, to abstain from showy reference. She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life and was constantly staring and wondering. She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world. [...]

[...] It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself; you could have made her colour, any day in the year, by calling her a rank egoist. She was always planning out her development, desiring her perfection, observing her progress. Her nature had, in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one’s spirit was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses. But she was often reminded that there were other gardens in the world than those of her remarkable soul, and that there were moreover a great many places which were not gardens at all — only dusky pestiferous tracts, planted thick with ugliness and misery. In the current of that repaid curiosity on which she had lately been floating, which had conveyed her to this beautiful old England and might carry her much further still, she often checked herself with the thought of the thousands of people who were less happy than herself — a thought which for the moment made her fine, full consciousness appear a kind of immodesty. What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for one’s self? It must be confessed that this question never held her long. She was too young, too impatient to live, too unacquainted with pain. She always returned to her theory that a young woman whom after all every one thought clever should begin by getting a general impression of life. This impression was necessary to prevent mistakes, and after it should be secured she might make the unfortunate condition of others a subject of special attention.

Lord Warburton seemed quite ready to walk, to sit or to do anything that Isabel should propose, and he gave her this assurance with his usual air of being particularly pleased to exercise a social virtue. But he was, nevertheless, not in command of his emotions, and as he strolled beside her for a moment, in silence, looking at her without letting her know it, there was something embarrassed in his glance and his misdirected laughter. Yes, assuredly — as we have touched on the point, we may return to it for a moment again — the English are the most romantic people in the world and Lord Warburton was about to give an example of it. He was about to take a step which would astonish all his friends and displease a great many of them, and which had superficially nothing to recommend it. The young lady who trod the turf beside him had come from a queer country across the sea which he knew a good deal about; her antecedents, her associations were very vague to his mind except in so far as they were generic, and in this sense they showed as distinct and unimportant. Miss Archer had neither a fortune nor the sort of beauty that justifies a man to the multitude, and he calculated that he had spent about twenty-six hours in her company. He had summed up all this — the perversity of the impulse, which had declined to avail itself of the most liberal opportunities to subside, and the judgement of mankind, as exemplified particularly in the more quickly-judging half of it: he had looked these things well in the face and then had dismissed them from his thoughts. He cared no more for them than for the rosebud in his buttonhole. It is the good fortune of a man who for the greater part of a lifetime has abstained without effort from making himself disagreeable to his friends, that when the need comes for such a course it is not discredited by irritating associations.

DEAR LORD WARBURTON — A great deal of earnest thought has not led me to change my mind about the suggestion you were so kind as to make me the other day. I am not, I am really and truly not, able to regard you in the light of a companion for life; or to think of your home — your various homes — as the settled seat of my existence. These things cannot be reasoned about, and I very earnestly entreat you not to return to the subject we discussed so exhaustively. We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us; and I shall never be able to see mine in the manner you proposed. Kindly let this suffice you, and do me the justice to believe that I have given your proposal the deeply respectful consideration it deserves. It is with this very great regard that I remain sincerely yours,

ISABEL ARCHER

“You’ve answered my question,’ he said at last. “‘You’ve told me what I wanted. I’m greatly obliged to you.’

‘It seems to me I’ve told you very little.’

“You’ve told me the great thing: that the world interests you and that you want to throw yourself into it.’

Her silvery eyes shone a moment in the dusk. ‘I never said that.’

‘I think you meant it. Don’t repudiate it. It’s so fine!’

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to fasten upon me, for I’m not in the least an adventurous spirit. Women are not like men.’

Ralph slowly rose from his seat and they walked together to the gate of the square. ‘No,’ he said; ‘women rarely boast of their courage. Men do so with a certain frequency.’

“Men have it to boast of!’

‘Women have it too. You’ve a great deal.’

‘And what shall I gain by that?’ her friend asked with no sign of wincing.

“You'll have obliged me greatly.’

‘And what will be my reward?’

‘Do you need a reward for an act of generosity?’

‘Yes, when it involves a great sacrifice.’

“There’s no generosity without some sacrifice. Men don’t understand such things. If you make the sacrifice you’ll have all my admiration.’

‘I don’t care a cent for your admiration — not one straw, with nothing to show for it. When will you marry me? That’s the only question.’

‘Never — if you go on making me feel only as I feel at present.’

‘What do I gain then by not trying to make you feel otherwise?’

“You'll gain quite as much as by worrying me to death!’

The lady played in the same manner as before, softly and
solemnly, and while she played the shadows deepened in the
room. The autumn twilight gathered in, and from her place
Isabel could see the rain, which had now begun in earnest,
washing the cold-looking lawn and the wind shaking the great
trees. At last, when the music had ceased, her companion got
up and, coming nearer with a smile, before Isabel had time to
thank her again, said: ‘I’m very glad you’ve come back; I’ve
heard a great deal about you.’

‘Well,’ the old man observed with wandering irrelevance, ‘it can’t be said that my death will make much difference in your mother’s life.’

‘It will probably make more than you think.’

‘Well, she’ll have more money,’ said Mr Touchett. ‘I’ve left her a good wife’s portion, just as if she had been a good wife.’

‘She has been one, daddy, according to her own theory. She has never troubled you.’

‘Ah, some troubles are pleasant,’ Mr Touchett murmured. “Those you’ve given me for instance. But your mother has been less — less — what shall I call it? less out of the way since I’ve been ill. I presume she knows I’ve noticed it.’

‘I shall certainly tell her so; I’m so glad you mention it.’

‘It won’t make any difference to her; she doesn’t do it to please me. She does it to please — to please —’ And he lay a while trying to think why she did it. ‘She does it because it suits her. But that’s not what I want to talk about,’ he added. ‘It’s about you. You'll be very well off.'

‘I hope not indeed,’ said Isabel, who added something about his being the kindest creature living. She remembered, however, that on her first asking him about Madame Merle he had answered her in a manner which this lady might have thought injurious without being explicit. There was something between them, Isabel said to herself, but she said nothing more than this. If it were something of importance it should inspire respect; if it were not it was not worth her curiosity. With all her love of knowledge she had a natural shrinking from raising curtains and looking into unlighted corners. The love of knowledge coexisted in her mind with the finest capacity for ignorance.

But Madame Merle sometimes said things that startled her, made her raise her clear eyebrows at the time and think of the words afterwards. ‘I'd give a great deal to be your age again,’ she broke out once with a bitterness which, though diluted in her customary amplitude of ease, was imperfectly disguised by it. ‘If I could only begin again — if I could have my life before me!’

‘Your life’s before you yet,’ Isabel answered gently, for she was vaguely awe-struck.

“No; the best part’s gone, and gone for nothing.’

‘Surely not for nothing,’ said Isabel.

“Why not — what have I got? Neither husband, nor child, nor fortune, nor position, nor the traces of a beauty that I never had.’

“You have many friends, dear lady.’

‘I’m not so sure!’ cried Madame Merle.

“Ah, you’re wrong. You have memories, graces, talents —’

But Madame Merle interrupted her. ‘What have my talents brought me? Nothing but the need of using them still, to get through the hours, the years, to cheat myself with some pretence of movement, of unconsciousness. As for my graces and memories the less said about them the better. You’ll be my friend till you find a better use for your friendship.’

“What has he? An ugly brick house in Fortieth Street? Don’t tell me that; I refuse to recognise that as an ideal.’

‘I don’t care anything about his house,’ said Isabel.

“That’s very crude of you. When you’ve lived as long as I you'll see that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There’s no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we’re each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our “self?? Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us — and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I’ve a great respect for things! One’s self — for other people — is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps — these things are all expressive.’

“You’ve plenty of time,’ she had said to Isabel in return for
the mutilated confidences which our young woman made her
and which didn’t pretend to be perfect, though we have seen
that at moments the girl had compunctions at having said so
much. ‘I’m glad you’ve done nothing yet — that you have it
still to do. It’s a very good thing for a girl to have refused a few
good offers — so long of course as they are not the best she’s
likely to have. Pardon me if my tone seems horribly corrupt;
one must take the worldly view sometimes. Only don’t keep
on refusing for the sake of refusing. It’s a pleasant exercise of
power; but accepting’s after all an exercise of power as well.
There’s always the danger of refusing once too often. It
was not the one I fell into — I didn’t refuse often enough.
You’re an exquisite creature and I should like to see you
married to a prime minister. But speaking strictly, you
know, you’re not what is technically called a parti. You’re
extremely good-looking and extremely clever; in yourself
you’re quite exceptional. You appear to have the vaguest
ideas about your earthly possessions; but from what I can
make out you’re not embarrassed with an income. I wish you
had a little money.’

By way of answer Isabel kissed her, and, though some
women kiss with facility, there are kisses and kisses, and this
embrace was satisfactory to Madame Merle. Our young lady,
after this, was much alone; she saw her aunt and cousin only
at meals, and discovered that of the hours during which Mrs
Touchett was invisible only a minor portion was now devoted
to nursing her husband. She spent the rest in her own apart-
ments, to which access was not allowed even to her niece,
apparently occupied there with mysterious and inscrutable
exercises. At table she was grave and silent; but her solemnity
was not an attitude — Isabel could see it was a conviction. She
wondered if her aunt repented of having taken her own
way so much; but there was no visible evidence of this — no
tears, no sighs, no exaggeration of a zeal always to its own
sense adequate. Mrs Touchett seemed simply to feel the
need of thinking things over and summing them up; she had
a little moral account-book — with columns unerringly ruled
and a sharp steel clasp — which she kept with exemplary neat-
ness. Uttered reflection had with her ever, at any rate, a prac-
tical ring. ‘If I had foreseen this I’'d not have proposed your
coming abroad now,’ she said to Isabel after Madame Merle
had left the house. ‘I’d have waited and sent for you next
year.’

‘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.

'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.’