The Portrait of a Lady

Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I see that it must have consisted not at all in any conceit of a ‘plot,’ nefarious name, in any flash, upon the fancy, of a set of relations, or in any one of those situations that, by a logic of their own, immediately fall, for the fabulist, into movement, into a march or a rush, a patter of quick steps; but altogether in the sense of a single character, the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman, to which all the usual elements of a ‘subject,’ certainly of a setting, were to need to be super-added. Quite as interesting as the young woman herself, at her best, do I find, I must again repeat, this projection of memory upon the whole matter of the growth, in one’s imagination, of some such apology for a motive. These are the fascinations of the fabulist’s art, these lurking forces of expansion, these necessities of upspringing in the seed, these beautiful determinations, on the part of the idea entertained, to grow as tall as possible, to push into the light and the air and thickly flower there; and, quite as much, these fine possibilities of recovering, from some good standpoint on the ground gained, the intimate history of the business—of retracing and reconstructing its steps and stages.

He saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles,* saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel.

I could think so little of any fable that didn’t need its agents positively to launch it; I could think so little of any situation that didn’t depend for its interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their way of taking it.

Thus I had my vivid individual—vivid, so strangely, in spite of being still at large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle, to which we look for much of the impress that constitutes an identity. If the apparition was still all to be placed how came it to be vivid?

It was as if they had simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my ken, and all in response to my primary question: ‘Well, what will she do?’

They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour.

His face was turned toward the house, but his eyes were bent musingly on the lawn; so that he had been an object of observation to a person who had just made her appearance in the ample doorway for some moments before he perceived her.

‘Oh, I hoped there would be a lord; it’s just like a novel!’

What degree of alarm this young person took need not be exactly measured; she instantly rose, however, with a blush which was not a refutation. ‘Oh yes, of course I’m lovely!’ she returned with a quick laugh. ‘How old is your house? Is it Elizabethan?’

‘Oh no; she has not adopted me. I’m not a candidate for adoption.’ ‘I beg a thousand pardons,’ Ralph murmured. ‘I meant—I meant—’ He hardly knew what he meant. ‘You meant she has taken me up. Yes; she likes to take people up. She has been very kind to me; but,’ she added with a certain visible eagerness of desire to be explicit, ‘I’m very fond of my liberty.’

She had taken up her niece—there was little doubt of that. One wet afternoon, some four months earlier than the occurrence lately narrated, this young lady had been seated alone with a book. To say she was so occupied is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilising quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of fresh taste in her situation which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to correct. The visitor had not been announced; the girl heard her at last walking about the adjoining room.

The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down. When she had found one to her taste—she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece—she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office.

Isabel stared; the idea of letting shops was new to her. ‘I hope they won’t pull it down,’ she said; ‘I’m extremely fond of it.’ ‘I don’t see what makes you fond of it; your father died here.’ ‘Yes, but I don’t dislike it for that,’ the girl rather strangely returned. ‘I like places in which things have happened—even if they’re sad things. A great many people have died here; the place has been full of life.’

‘I mean full of experience—of people’s feelings and sorrows. And not of their sorrows only, for I’ve been very happy here as a child.’

‘Whenever I feel grand,’ said the girl, ‘it will be for a better reason.’

She had a desire to leave the past behind her and, as she said to herself, to begin afresh. This desire indeed was not a birth of the present occasion; it was as familiar as the sound of the rain upon the window and it had led to her beginning afresh a great many times.

His friends at present judged him more cheerful, and attributed it to a theory, over which they shook their heads knowingly, that he would recover his health. His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin.

found her in an old house at Albany, sitting in a dreary room on a rainy day, reading a heavy book and boring herself to death. She didn’t know she was bored, but when I left her no doubt of it she seemed very grateful for the service.

You may say I shouldn’t have enlightened her—I should have let her alone. There’s a good deal in that, but I acted conscientiously; I thought she was meant for something better. It occurred to me that it would be a kindness to take her about and introduce her to the world.

You may suspect that at first, but you’ll be wrong. You won’t, I think, in any way, be easily right about her.’

His mother shook her head. ‘Lord Warburton won’t understand her. He needn’t try.’

‘Do with her? You talk as if she were a yard of calico. I shall do absolutely nothing with her, and she herself will do everything she chooses. She gave me notice of that.’

ISABEL ARCHER was a young person of many theories; her imagination was remarkably active.

Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was.

Deep in her soul—it was the deepest thing there—lay a belief that if a certain light should dawn she could give herself completely; but this image, on the whole, was too formidable to be attractive.

‘A character like that,’ he said to himself—‘a real little passionate force to see at play is the finest thing in nature. It’s finer than the finest work of art—than a Greek bas-relief, than a great Titian,* than a Gothic cathedral.

But Isabel had need to remind herself that she was interested in human nature and that her foremost hope in coming abroad had been that she should see a great many people.

These words were uttered with an indefinable sound which startled the girl; it struck her as the prelude to something grave: she had heard the sound before and she recognised it.

‘I don’t mean of course that you amuse yourself with trifles. You select great materials; the foibles, the afflictions of human nature, the peculiarities of nations!’

‘To please you I’ll be an Englishman, I’ll be a Turk!’ ‘Well, if you can change about that way you’re very welcome,’ Miss Stackpole returned. ‘I’m sure you understand everything and that differences of nationality are no barrier to you,’ Ralph went on. Miss Stackpole gazed at him still. ‘Do you mean the foreign languages?’ ‘The languages are nothing. I mean the spirit—the genius.’ ‘I’m not sure that I understand you,’ said the correspondent of the Interviewer; ‘but I expect I shall before I leave.’

in her exquisitely neat and legible hand (exactly that of the copybooks which our heroine remembered at school)

Miss Stackpole’s ocular surfaces unwinkingly caught the sun.

‘If I should tell her I wouldn’t express it in that way. I should say it’s because there’s something of the “people” in her.’ ‘What do you know about the people? and what does she, for that matter?’ ‘She knows a great deal, and I know enough to feel that she’s a kind of emanation of the great democracy—of the continent, the country, the nation. I don’t say that she sums it all up, that would be too much to ask of her. But she suggests it; she vividly figures it.’

She had walked into the park in company with the sociable Bunchie, and after strolling about for some time, in a manner at once listless and restless, had seated herself on a garden bench, within sight of the house, beneath a spreading beech, where, in a white dress ornamented with black ribbons, she formed among the flickering shadows a graceful and harmonious image.

‘I can’t escape unhappiness,’ said Isabel. ‘In marrying you I shall be trying to.’

‘I’m not bent on a life of misery,’ said Isabel. ‘I’ve always been intensely determined to be happy, and I’ve often believed I should be. I’ve told people that; you can ask them. But it comes over me every now and then that I can never be happy in any extraordinary way; not by turning away, by separating myself.’ ‘By separating yourself from what?’ ‘From life. From the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer.’

Isabel looked into her quiet eyes a moment, and for that moment seemed to see in their grey depths the reflexion of everything she had rejected in rejecting Lord Warburton—the peace, the kindness, the honour, the possessions, a deep security and a great exclusion.

‘Miss Stackpole takes notes,’ Ralph soothingly explained. ‘She’s a great satirist; she sees through us all and she works us up.’ ‘Well, I must say I never have had such a collection of bad material!’ Henrietta declared, looking from Isabel to Lord Warburton and from this nobleman to his sister and to Ralph. ‘There’s something the matter with you all; you’re as dismal as if you had got a bad cable.’ ‘You do see through us, Miss Stackpole,’ said Ralph in a low tone, giving her a little intelligent nod as he led the party out of the gallery. ‘There’s something the matter with us all.’

Mr Bantling promised to do his best, and the two took their departure, leaving the girl and her cousin together in the square, over which a clear September twilight had now begun to gather. It was perfectly still; the wide quadrangle of dusky houses showed lights in none of the windows, where the shutters and blinds were closed; the pavements were a vacant expanse, and, putting aside two small children from a neighbouring slum, who, attracted by symptoms of abnormal animation in the interior, poked their faces between the rusty rails of the enclosure, the most vivid object within sight was the big red pillar-post on the southeast corner.

‘She has made a conquest. He thinks her a brilliant woman. It may go far,’ said Ralph. Isabel was briefly silent. ‘I call Henrietta a very brilliant woman, but I don’t think it will go far. They would never really know each other. He has not the least idea what she really is, and she has no just comprehension of Mr Bantling.’ ‘There’s no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding. But it ought not to be so difficult to understand Bob Bantling,’ Ralph added. ‘He is a very simple organism.’

‘Not in the least. I’m absolutely without a wish on the subject. I don’t pretend to advise you, and I content myself with watching you—with the deepest interest.’ She gave rather a conscious sigh. ‘I wish I could be as interesting to myself as I am to you!’

‘You evidently expect a crowned head will be struck with you.’ ‘No, that would be worse than marrying Lord Warburton. But it’s getting very dark,’ Isabel continued, ‘and I must go home.’ She rose from her place, but Ralph only sat still and looked at her. As he remained there she stopped, and they exchanged a gaze that was full on either side, but especially on Ralph’s, of utterances too vague for words.

Caspar Goodwood raised his eyes to her own again; they seemed to shine through the vizard of a helmet. He had a strong sense of justice and was ready any day in the year—over and above this—to argue the question of his rights. ‘You said you hoped never to hear from me again; I know that. But I never accepted any such rule as my own. I warned you that you should hear very soon.’ ‘I didn’t say I hoped never to hear from you,’ said Isabel. ‘Not for five years then; for ten years; twenty years. It’s the same thing.’ ‘Do you find it so? It seems to me there’s a great difference. I can imagine that at the end of ten years we might have a very pleasant correspondence. I shall have matured my epistolary style.’

‘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!’ Caspar Goodwood bent his eyes again and gazed a while into the crown of his hat. A deep flush overspread his face; she could see her sharpness had at last penetrated. This immediately had a value—classic, romantic, redeeming, what did she know?—for her; ‘the strong man in pain’ was one of the categories of the human appeal, little charm as he might exert in the given case.

This attitude was part of a system, a theory, that she had lately embraced, and to be thorough she said after a moment: ‘Don’t think me unkind if I say it’s just that—being out of your sight—that I like. If you were in the same place I should feel you were watching me, and I don’t like that—I like my liberty too much. If there’s a thing in the world I’m fond of,’ she went on with a slight recurrence of grandeur, ‘it’s my personal independence.’

Isabel was on the point of ringing to send a question to her room, when this purpose quickly yielded to an unexpected sound—the sound of low music proceeding apparently from the saloon. She knew her aunt never touched the piano, and the musician was therefore probably Ralph, who played for his own amusement. That he should have resorted to this recreation at the present time indicated apparently that his anxiety about his father had been relieved; so that the girl took her way, almost with restored cheer, toward the source of the harmony. The drawing-room at Gardencourt was an apartment of great distances, and, as the piano was placed at the end of it furthest removed from the door at which she entered, her arrival was not noticed by the person seated before the instrument. This person was neither Ralph nor his mother; it was a lady whom Isabel immediately saw to be a stranger to herself, though her back was presented to the door.

‘Ah then she’s not French,’ Isabel murmured; and as the opposite supposition had made her romantic it might have seemed that this revelation would have marked a drop. But such was not the fact; rarer even than to be French seemed it to be American on such interesting terms.

‘Her marrying—some one or other? It’s just to do away with anything of that sort that I make my suggestion. If she has an easy income she’ll never have to marry for a support. That’s what I want cannily to prevent. She wishes to be free, and your bequest will make her free.’

Isabel did so with a perfectly good conscience, though she would have hesitated to admit she was intimate with her new friend in the high sense she privately attached to this term. She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with any one. She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments, which it failed to seem to her in this case—it had not seemed to her in other cases—that the actual completely expressed.

Before luncheon, always, Madame Merle was engaged; Isabel admired and envied her rigid possession of her morning. Our heroine had always passed for a person of resources and had taken a certain pride in being one; but she wandered, as by the wrong side of the wall of a private garden, round the enclosed talents, accomplishments, aptitudes of Madame Merle. She found herself desiring to emulate them, and in twenty such ways this lady presented herself as a model.

‘That’s the great thing,’ Isabel solemnly pondered; ‘that’s the supreme good fortune: to be in a better position for appreciating people than they are for appreciating you.’ And she added that such, when one considered it, was simply the essence of the aristocratic situation. In this light, if in none other, one should aim at the aristocratic situation.

‘What’s language at all but a convention?’ said Isabel. ‘She has the good taste not to pretend, like some people I’ve met, to express herself by original signs.’

Serena Merle hasn’t a fault.’ ‘If I didn’t already like her very much that description might alarm me,’ Isabel returned. ‘She’s never the least little bit “off.” I’ve brought you out here and I wish to do the best for you. Your sister Lily told me she hoped I would give you plenty of opportunities. I give you one in putting you in relation with Madame Merle. She’s one of the most brilliant women in Europe.’ ‘I like her better than I like your description of her,’ Isabel persisted in saying.

‘I’m old and stale and faded,’ she said more than once; ‘I’m of no more interest than last week’s newspaper. You’re young and fresh and of to-day; you’ve the great thing—you’ve actuality.

Well, I am, if you please; I was born before the French Revolution. Ah, my dear, je viens de loin;* I belong to the old, old world.

He’s Gilbert Osmond—he lives in Italy; that’s all one can say about him or make of him. He’s exceedingly clever, a man made to be distinguished; but, as I tell you, you exhaust the description when you say he’s Mr Osmond who lives tout bêtement* in Italy. No career, no name, no position, no fortune, no past, no future, no anything.

the guidance of Mrs Touchett, who took a rigidly practical view of the transformation of her niece from a poor girl to a rich one. ‘Now that you’re a young woman of fortune you must know how to play the part––I mean to play it well,’ she said to Isabel once for all; and she added that the girl’s first duty was to have everything handsome. ‘You don’t know how to take care of your things, but you must learn,’ she went on; this was Isabel’s second duty. Isabel submitted, but for the present her imagination was not kindled; she longed for opportunities, but these were not the opportunities she meant.

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.

Each of these groping celibates* supplied at any rate a want of which the other was impatiently conscious. Mr Bantling, who was of rather a slow and a discursive habit, relished a prompt, keen, positive woman, who charmed him by the influence of a shining, challenging eye and a kind of bandbox freshness, and who kindled a perception of raciness in a mind to which the usual fare of life seemed unsalted. Henrietta, on the other hand, enjoyed the society of a gentleman who appeared somehow, in his way, made, by expensive, roundabout, almost ‘quaint’ processes, for her use, and whose leisured state, though generally indefensible, was a decided boon to a breathless mate, and who was furnished with an easy, traditional, though by no means exhaustive, answer to almost any social or practical question that could come up.

‘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.

Her fortune therefore became to her mind a part of her better self; it gave her importance, gave her even, to her own imagination, a certain ideal beauty. What it did for her in the imagination of others is another affair, and on this point we must also touch in time.

It is not, however, with the outside of the place that we are concerned; on this bright morning of ripened spring its tenants had reason to prefer the shady side of the wall. The windows of the ground-floor, as you saw them from the piazza, were, in their noble proportions, extremely architectural; but their function seemed less to offer communication with the world than to defy the world to look in.

If he had English blood in his veins it had probably received some French or Italian commixture; but he suggested, fine gold coin as he was, no stamp nor emblem of the common mintage that provides for general circulation; he was the elegant complicated medal struck off for a special occasion.

‘If you like I won’t listen,’ Pansy suggested with an appearance of candour which imposed conviction. ‘You may listen, charming child, because you won’t understand,’ her father replied.

‘Exactly; but yourself includes so many other selves––so much of every one else and of everything. I never knew a person whose life touched so many other lives.’ ‘What do you call one’s life?’ asked Madame Merle. ‘One’s appearance, one’s movements, one’s engagements, one’s society?’

The point to be made is, however, that at a certain moment the element between them, whatever it was, always levelled itself and left them more closely face to face than either ever was with any one else. This was what had happened now. They stood there knowing each other well and each on the whole willing to accept the satisfaction of knowing as a compensation for the inconvenience––whatever it might be––of being known. ‘I wish very much you were not so heartless,’ Madame Merle quietly said. ‘It has always been against you, and it will be against you now.’

This was a note of cynicism that Madame Merle didn’t often allow herself to sound; but Isabel was not alarmed, for she had never supposed that as one saw more of the world the sentiment of respect became the most active of one’s emotions. It was excited, none the less, by the beautiful city of Florence, which pleased her not less than Madame Merle had promised;

There was something grave and strong in the place; it looked somehow as if, once you were in, you would need an act of energy to get out.

She remembered that Ralph had not recommended her as an acquaintance; but she was ready to acknowledge that to a casual view the Countess Gemini revealed no depths.* Her demonstrations suggested the violent waving of some flag of general truce—white silk with fluttering streamers.

‘By that rule then, I’ve not been frivolous.’ ‘Have you never made plans?’ ‘Yes, I made one years ago, and I’m acting on it to-day.’ ‘It must have been a very pleasant one,’ Isabel permitted herself to observe. ‘It was very simple. It was to be as quiet as possible.’ ‘As quiet?’ the girl repeated. ‘Not to worry—not to strive nor struggle. To resign myself. To be content with little.’ He spoke these sentences slowly, with short pauses between, and his intelligent regard was fixed on his visitor’s with the conscious air of a man who has brought himself to confess something. ‘Do you call that simple?’ she asked with mild irony. ‘Yes, because it’s negative.’ ‘Has your life been negative?’ ‘Call it affirmative if you like. Only it has affirmed my indifference. Mind you, not my natural indifference—I had none. But my studied, my wilful renunciation.’

Isabel considered him with interest. ‘You seem to me to be always envying some one. Yesterday it was the Pope; today it’s poor Lord Warburton.’ ‘My envy’s not dangerous;* it wouldn’t hurt a mouse. I don’t want to destroy the people—I only want to be them. You see it would destroy only myself.’ ‘You’d like to be the Pope?’ said Isabel. ‘I should love it—but I should have gone in for it earlier. But why’—Osmond reverted—‘do you speak of your friend as poor?’

Isabel looked a moment at the vanquished Gladiator. ‘It’s not true. I’m scrupulously kind.’ ‘That’s exactly what I mean!’ Gilbert Osmond returned, and with such happy hilarity that his joke needs to be explained. We know that he was fond of originals, of rarities, of the superior and the exquisite; and now that he had seen Lord Warburton, whom he thought a very fine example of his race and order, he perceived a new attraction in the idea of taking to himself a young lady who had qualified herself to figure in his collection of choice objects by declining so noble a hand. Gilbert Osmond had a high appreciation of this particular patriciate; not so much for its distinction, which he thought easily surpassable, as for its solid actuality. He had never forgiven his star for not appointing him to an English dukedom, and he could measure the unexpectedness of such conduct as Isabel’s. It would be proper that the woman he might marry should have done something of that sort.

He thought Miss Archer sometimes of too precipitate a readiness. It was pity she had that fault, because if she had not had it she would really have had none; she would have been as smooth to his general need of her as handled ivory to the palm.

If an anonymous drawing on a museum wall had been conscious and watchful it might have known this peculiar pleasure of being at last and all of a sudden identified—as from the hand of a great master—by the so high and so unnoticed fact of style.* His ‘style’ was what the girl had discovered with a little help; and now, beside herself enjoying it, she should publish it to the world without his having any of the trouble. She should do the thing for him, and he would not have waited in vain.

‘What I wish to say to you,’ he went on at last, looking up, ‘is that I find I’m in love with you.’ She instantly rose. ‘Ah, keep that till I am tired!’ ‘Tired of hearing it from others?’ He sat there raising his eyes to her. ‘No, you may heed it now or never, as you please. But after all I must say it now.’ She had turned away, but in the movement she had stopped herself and dropped her gaze upon him. The two remained a while in this situation, exchanging a long look—the large, conscious look of the critical hours of life. Then he got up and came near her, deeply respectful, as if he were afraid he had been too familiar. ‘I’m absolutely in love with you.’

The tears came into her eyes: this time they obeyed the sharpness of the pang that suggested to her somehow the slipping of a fine bolt—backward, forward, she couldn’t have said which.

‘Oh don’t say that, please,’ she answered with an intensity that expressed the dread of having, in this case too, to choose and decide. What made her dread great was precisely the force which, as it would seem, ought to have banished all dread—the sense of something within herself, deep down, that she supposed to be inspired and trustful passion. It was there like a large sum stored in a bank—which there was a terror in having to begin to spend. If she touched it, it would all come out.*

So I offer nothing.

Isabel was fond, ever, of the question of character and quality, of sounding, as who should say, the deep personal mystery, and it had pleased her, up to this time, to be in doubt as to whether this tender slip were not really all-knowing. Was the extremity of her candour but the perfection of self-consciousness? Was it put on to please her father’s visitor, or was it the direct expression of an unspotted nature? The hour that Isabel spent in Mr Osmond’s beautiful empty, dusky rooms—the windows had been half-darkened, to keep out the heat, and here and there, through an easy crevice, the splendid summer day peeped in, lighting a gleam of faded colour or tarnished gilt in the rich gloom—her interview with the daughter of the house, I say, effectually settled this question. Pansy was really a blank page, a pure white surface, successfully kept so; she had neither art, nor guile, nor temper, nor talent—only two or three small exquisite instincts: for knowing a friend, for avoiding a mistake, for taking care of an old toy or a new frock.

She would have no will, no power to resist, no sense of her own importance; she would easily be mystified, easily crushed: her force would be all in knowing when and where to cling. She moved about the place with her visitor, who had asked leave to walk through the other rooms again, where Pansy gave her judgement on several works of art.

They went together through the vestibule, to the door that opened on the court; and there her young hostess stopped, looking rather wistfully beyond. ‘I may go no further. I’ve promised papa not to pass this door.’ ‘You’re right to obey him; he’ll never ask you anything unreasonable.’ ‘I shall always obey him. But when will you come again?’ ‘Not for a long time, I’m afraid.’ ‘As soon as you can, I hope. I’m only a little girl,’ said Pansy, ‘but I shall always expect you.’ And the small figure stood in the high, dark doorway, watching Isabel cross the clear, grey court and disappear into the brightness beyond the big portone,* which gave a wider dazzle as it opened.

The tall window was open, and though its green shutters were partly drawn the bright air of the garden had come in through a broad interstice and filled the room with warmth and perfume. Our young woman stood near it for some time, her hands clasped behind her; she gazed abroad with the vagueness of unrest. Too troubled for attention she moved in a vain circle. Yet it could not be in her thought to catch a glimpse of her visitor before he should pass into the house, since the entrance to the palace was not through the garden, in which stillness and privacy always reigned. She wished rather to forestall his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judge by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do.

She liked her as much as ever, but there was a corner of the curtain that never was lifted; it was as if she had remained after all something of a public performer, condemned to emerge only in character and in costume. She had once said that she came from a distance, that she belonged to the ‘old, old’ world, and Isabel never lost the impression that she was the product of a different moral or social clime from her own, that she had grown up under other stars.

She believed then that at bottom she had a different morality.

IT was not of him, nevertheless, that she was thinking while she stood at the window near which we found her a while ago, and it was not of any of the matters I have rapidly sketched. She was not turned to the past, but to the immediate, impending hour. She had reason to expect a scene, and she was not fond of scenes. She was not asking herself what she should say to her visitor; this question had already been answered. What he would say to her—that was the interesting issue. It could be nothing in the least soothing—she had warrant for this, and the conviction doubtless showed in the cloud on her brow. For the rest, however, all clearness reigned in her; she had put away her mourning and she walked in no small shimmering splendour.

‘I’d rather think of you as dead than as married to another man.’ ‘That’s very selfish of you!’ she returned with the ardour of a real conviction. ‘If you’re not happy yourself others have yet a right to be.’

‘What has he ever done?’ he added abruptly. ‘That I should marry him? Nothing at all,’ Isabel replied while her patience helped itself by turning a little to hardness. ‘If he had done great things would you forgive me any better? Give me up, Mr Goodwood; I’m marrying a perfect nonentity. Don’t try to take an interest in him. You can’t.’

‘Please don’t go back to that. Why shouldn’t I like Mr Osmond, since others have done so?’ ‘Others, at their wildest moments, never wanted to marry him. There’s nothing of him,’ Mrs Touchett explained. ‘Then he can’t hurt me,’ said Isabel.

‘Is it that Mr Osmond isn’t rich? Is that what you’re talking about?’ Isabel asked. ‘He has no money; he has no name; he has no importance. I value such things and I have the courage to say it; I think they’re very precious. Many other people think the same, and they show it. But they give some other reason.’ Isabel hesitated a little. ‘I think I value everything that’s valuable. I care very much for money, and that’s why I wish Mr Osmond to have a little.’ ‘Give it to him then; but marry some one else.’ ‘His name’s good enough for me,’ the girl went on. ‘It’s a very pretty name. Have I such a fine one myself?’ ‘All the more reason you should improve on it. There are only a dozen American names. Do you marry him out of charity?’

Poor Ralph made no nearer approach to conventional beauty as he advanced in life, and the now apparently complete loss of his health had done little to mitigate the natural oddity of his person. Blighted and battered, but still responsive and still ironic, his face was like a lighted lantern patched with paper and unsteadily held; his thin whisker languished upon a lean cheek; the exorbitant curve of his nose defined itself more sharply.

He was so charming that her sense of his being ill had hitherto had a sort of comfort in it; the state of his health had seemed not a limitation, but a kind of intellectual advantage; it absolved him from all professional and official emotions and left him the luxury of being exclusively personal.

Isabel noted afresh that life was certainly hard for some people, and she felt a delicate glow of shame as she thought how easy it now promised to become for herself.

You could criticise any marriage; it was the essence of a marriage to be open to criticism.

‘Because you’re going to be put into a cage.’

‘I don’t think you ever will,’ said Ralph. ‘It’s not in the least the sort of marriage I thought you’d make.’ ‘What sort of marriage was that, pray?’ ‘Well, I can hardly say. I hadn’t exactly a positive view of it, but I had a negative. I didn’t think you’d decide for—well, for that type.’ ‘What’s the matter with Mr Osmond’s type, if it be one? His being so independent, so individual, is what I most see in him,’ the girl declared. ‘What do you know against him? You know him scarcely at all.’

Ralph for a moment felt almost reassured by her reasonable tone. ‘Yes, but everything is relative; one ought to feel one’s relation to things—to others. I don’t think Mr Osmond does that.’ ‘I’ve chiefly to do with his relation to me. In that he’s excellent.’ ‘He’s the incarnation of taste,’ Ralph went on, thinking hard how he could best express Gilbert Osmond’s sinister attributes without putting himself in the wrong by seeming to describe him coarsely. He wished to describe him impersonally, scientifically. ‘He judges and measures, approves and condemns, altogether by that.’

‘I’ve said what I had on my mind—and I’ve said it because I love you!’ Isabel turned pale: was he too on that tiresome list? She had a sudden wish to strike him off. ‘Ah then, you’re not disinterested!’ ‘I love you, but I love without hope,’ said Ralph quickly, forcing a smile and feeling that in that last declaration he had expressed more than he intended.

She was wrong, but she believed; she was deluded, but she was dismally consistent. It was wonderfully characteristic of her that, having invented a fine theory about Gilbert Osmond, she loved him not for what he really possessed, but for his very poverties dressed out as honours. Ralph remembered what he had said to his father about wishing to put it into her power to meet the requirements of her imagination. He had done so, and the girl had taken full advantage of luxury. Poor Ralph felt sick; he felt ashamed.

Contentment, on his part, took no vulgar form; excitement, in the most self-conscious of men, was a kind of ecstasy of self-control.

He was immensely pleased with his young lady; Madame Merle had made him a present of incalculable value. What could be a finer thing to live with than a high spirit attuned to softness?

What could be a happier gift in a companion than a quick, fanciful mind which saved one repetitions and reflected one’s thought on a polished, elegant surface? Osmond hated to see his thought reproduced literally—that made it look stale and stupid; he preferred it to be freshened in the reproduction even as ‘words’ by music. His egotism had never taken the crude form of desiring a dull wife; this lady’s intelligence was to be a silver plate, not an earthen one—a plate that he might heap up with ripe fruits, to which it would give a decorative value, so that talk might become for him a sort of served dessert.

he could tap her imagination with his knuckle and make it ring.

I used to want a great many things before and to be angry I didn’t have them. Theoretically I was satisfied, as I once told you. I flattered myself I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid, sterile, hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I’m really satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better.

The desire for unlimited expansion had been succeeded in her soul by the sense that life was vacant without some private duty that might gather one’s energies to a point.

He was very fond, in all things, of the ‘old way’; that had struck Isabel as one of his fine, quiet, sincere notes.

Isabel was impressed by Osmond’s artistic, the plastic view, as it somehow appeared, of Pansy’s innocence

‘Perhaps she had guessed it,’ said Isabel. ‘Don’t say that; I should be disgusted if I believed that. I thought it would be just a little shock; but the way she took it proves that her good manners are paramount. That’s also what I wished.

He had made to a certain extent good use of his time; he had devoted it in vain to finding a flaw in Pansy Osmond’s composition. She was admirably finished; she had had the last touch; she was really a consummate piece. He thought of her in amorous meditation a good deal as he might have thought of a Dresden-china shepherdess. Miss Osmond, indeed, in the bloom of her juvenility, had a hint of the rococo* which Rosier, whose taste was predominantly for that manner, could not fail to appreciate.

The object of Mr Rosier’s well-regulated affection dwelt in a high house in the very heart of Rome; a dark and massive structure overlooking a sunny piazzetta in the neighbourhood of the Farnese Palace.

In a palace, too, little Pansy lived—a palace by Roman measure, but a dungeon to poor Rosier’s apprehensive mind. It seemed to him of evil omen that the young lady he wished to marry, and whose fastidious father he doubted of his ability to conciliate, should be immured in a kind of domestic fortress, a pile which bore a stern old Roman name, which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence, which was mentioned in ‘Murray’ and visited by tourists who looked, on a vague survey, disappointed and depressed, and which had frescoes by Caravaggio in the piano nobile* and a row of mutilated statues and dusty urns in the wide, nobly-arched loggia overhanging the damp court where a fountain gushed out of a mossy niche.

But Rosier was haunted by the conviction that at picturesque periods young girls had been shut up there to keep them from their true loves, and then, under the threat of being thrown into convents, had been forced into unholy marriages. There was one point, however, to which he always did justice when once he found himself in Mrs Osmond’s warm, rich-looking reception-rooms, which were on the second floor. He acknowledged that these people were very strong in ‘good things.’ It was a taste of Osmond’s own—not at all of hers; this she had told him the first time he came to the house, when, after asking himself for a quarter of an hour whether they had even better ‘French’ than he in Paris, he was obliged on the spot to admit that they had, very much, and vanquished his envy, as a gentleman should, to the point of expressing to his hostess his pure admiration of her treasures.

Now, at all events, framed in the gilded doorway, she struck our young man as the picture of a gracious lady.

Osmond had raised his foot and was resting his slim ankle on the other knee; he clasped his ankle in his hand familiarly—his long, fine forefinger and thumb could make a ring for it—and gazed a while before him. ‘This kind of thing doesn’t find me unprepared. It’s what I educated her for. It was all for this—that when such a case should come up she should do what I prefer.’

He answered her questions as if they interested him, and in a few moments she saw—or believed she saw—that he would press with less of his whole weight than of yore. Time had breathed upon his heart and, without chilling it, given it a relieved sense of having taken the air. Isabel felt her usual esteem for Time rise at a bound.

She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.

She raised the lid of the tea-pot, gazing into this vessel for a moment; then she dropped six words into its aromatic depths. ‘I love you just as much.’

She lived with a certain magnificence, but you needed to be a member of her circle to perceive it; for there was nothing to gape at, nothing to criticise, nothing even to admire, in the daily proceedings of Mr and Mrs Osmond.

Her light step drew a mass of drapery behind it; her intelligent head sustained a majesty of ornament. The free, keen girl had become quite another person; what he saw was the fine lady who was supposed to represent something. What did Isabel represent? Ralph asked himself; and he could only answer by saying that she represented Gilbert Osmond.

He recognised Osmond, as I say; he recognised him at every turn. He saw how he kept all things within limits; how he adjusted, regulated, animated their manner of life. Osmond was in his element; at last he had material to work with. He always had an eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great. To surround his interior with a sort of invidious sanctity, to tantalise society with a sense of exclusion, to make people believe his house was different from every other, to impart to the face that he presented to the world a cold originality—this was the ingenious effort of the personage to whom Isabel had attributed a superior morality.

under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far from being its master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success.

Everything he did was pose—pose so subtly considered that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse. Ralph had never met a man who lived so much in the land of consideration. His tastes, his studies, his accomplishments, his collections, were all for a purpose. His life on his hilltop at Florence had been the conscious attitude of years. His solitude, his ennui, his love for his daughter, his good manners, his bad manners, were so many features of a mental image constantly present to him as a model of impertinence and mystification. His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world’s curiosity and then declining to satisfy it.

What kept Ralph alive was simply the fact that he had not yet seen enough of the person in the world in whom he was most interested: he was not yet satisfied.

Familiarity had modified in some degree her first impression of Madame Merle, but it had not essentially altered it; there was still much wonder of admiration in it. That personage was armed at all points; it was a pleasure to see a character so completely equipped for the social battle.

Isabel, as she herself grew older, became acquainted with revulsions, with disgusts; there were days when the world looked black and she asked herself with some sharpness what it was that she was pretending to live for. Her old habit had been to live by enthusiasm, to fall in love with suddenly-perceived possibilities, with the idea of some new adventure. As a younger person she had been used to proceed from one little exaltation to the other; there were scarcely any dull places between. But Madame Merle had suppressed enthusiasm; she fell in love now-a–days with nothing; she lived entirely by reason and by wisdom.

It was impossible to pretend that she had not acted with her eyes open; if ever a girl was a free agent she had been. A girl in love was doubtless not a free agent; but the sole source of her mistake had been within herself. There had been no plot, no snare; she had looked and considered and chosen. When a woman had made such a mistake, there was only one way to repair it—just immensely (oh, with the highest grandeur!) to accept it.

She had gathered a handful of flowers in a sunny hollow, far from the walls of Rome, and on reaching Palazzo Roccanera she went straight to her room, to put them into water. Isabel passed into the drawingroom, the one she herself usually occupied, the second in order from the large ante-chamber which was entered from the staircase and in which even Gilbert Osmond’s rich devices had not been able to correct a look of rather grand nudity. Just beyond the threshold of the drawing-room she stopped short, the reason for her doing so being that she had received an impression. The impression had, in strictness, nothing unprecedented; but she felt it as something new, and the soundlessness of her step gave her time to take in the scene before she interrupted it. Madame Merle was there in her bonnet, and Gilbert Osmond was talking to her; for a minute they were unaware she had come in.

But the thing made an image, lasting only a moment, like a sudden flicker of light. Their relative positions, their absorbed mutual gaze, struck her as something detected. But it was all over by the time she had fairly seen it.

Madame Merle stared, and indeed she was justly bewildered. ‘Ah, a moment ago I thought you seemed rather to disparage her.’ ‘I said she was limited. And so she is. And so’s Lord Warburton.’

When Isabel was unhappy she always looked about her—partly from impulse and partly by theory—for some form of positive exertion. She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease—of suffering as opposed to doing. To ‘do’—it hardly mattered what—would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy. Besides, she wished to convince herself that she had done everything possible to content her husband; she was determined not to be haunted by visions of his wife’s limpness under appeal.

Then such an undertaking had other recommendations. It would occupy her, and she desired occupation. It would even amuse her, and if she could really amuse herself she perhaps might be saved.

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 matters, and nothing was more unaccountable or more natural than anything else.

Pansy, however, in spite of her simplicity, really did understand, and was glad that Lord Warburton should talk to her, not about her partners and bouquets, but about the state of Italy, the condition of the peasantry, the famous grist-tax, the pellagra,* his impressions of Roman society. She looked at him, as she drew her needle through her tapestry, with sweet submissive eyes, and when she lowered them she gave little quiet oblique glances at his person, his hands, his feet, his clothes, as if she were considering him. Even his person, Isabel might have reminded her, was better than Mr Rosier’s. But Isabel contented herself at such moments with wondering where this gentleman was; he came no more at all to Palazzo Roccanera. It was surprising, as I say, the hold it had taken of her—the idea of assisting her husband to be pleased.

Covert observation had become a habit with her; an instinct, of which it is not an exaggeration to say that it was allied to that of self-defence, had made it habitual.

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.

She knew of no wrong he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel: she simply believed he hated her.

He was like a sceptical voyager strolling on the beach while he waited for the tide, looking seaward yet not putting to sea.

She remembered perfectly the first sign he had given of it—it had been like the 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.

She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond’s beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond’s beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her.

She had thought it a grand indifference, an exquisite independence. But indifference was really the last of his qualities; she had never seen any one who thought so much of others. For herself, avowedly, the world had always interested her and the study of her fellow creatures been her constant passion. She would have been willing, however, to renounce all her curiosities and sympathies for the sake of a personal life, if the person concerned had only been able to make her believe it was a gain! This at least was her present conviction; and the thing certainly would have been easier than to care for society as Osmond cared for it. He was unable to live without it, and she saw that he had never really done so; he had looked at it out of his window even when he appeared to be most detached from it.

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.

When the clock struck four she got up; she was going to bed at last, for the lamp had long since gone out and the candles burned down to their sockets. But even then she stopped again in the middle of the room and stood there gazing at a remembered vision—that of her husband and Madame Merle unconsciously and familiarly associated.

Henrietta was as keen and quick and fresh as ever, and as neat and bright and fair. Her remarkably open eyes, lighted like great glazed railway-stations,* had put up no shutters; her attire had lost none of its crispness, her opinions none of their national reference.

She didn’t for a moment pretend that the desire to examine decaying civilisations had anything to do with her present enterprise; her journey was rather an expression of her independence of the old world than of a sense of further obligations to it.

Do you know what she reminds me of? Of a new steel pen—the most odious thing in nature. She talks as a steel pen writes; aren’t her letters, by the way, on ruled paper? She thinks and moves and walks and looks exactly as she talks.

She had been obliged to introduce him to Gilbert; it was impossible she should not ask him to dinner, to her Thursday evenings, of which she had grown very weary, but to which her husband still held for the sake not so much of inviting people as of not inviting them.

‘You’ve had no encouragement. In this case I should give you the greatest. Leave your husband before the worst comes; that’s what I want you to promise.’ ‘The worst? What do you call the worst?’ ‘Before your character gets spoiled.’ ‘Do you mean my disposition? It won’t get spoiled,’ Isabel answered, smiling. ‘I’m taking very good care of it. I’m extremely struck,’ she added, turning away, ‘with the off-hand way in which you speak of a woman’s leaving her husband. It’s easy to see you’ve never had one!’ ‘Well,’ said Henrietta as if she were beginning an argument, ‘nothing is more common in our Western cities, and it’s to them, after all, that we must look in the future.’

‘Yes, it’s a generous one,’ said Isabel, ‘and it makes me deeply ashamed. I ought to go with you, you know.’ ‘Your husband wouldn’t like that.’ ‘No, he wouldn’t like it. But I might go, all the same.’ ‘I’m startled by the boldness of your imagination. Fancy my being a cause of disagreement between a lady and her husband!’ ‘That’s why I don’t go,’ said Isabel simply—yet not very lucidly. Ralph understood well enough, however. ‘I should think so, with all those occupations you speak of.’ ‘It isn’t that. I’m afraid,’ said Isabel. After a pause she repeated, as if to make herself, rather than him, hear the words: ‘I’m afraid.’

‘I’m very fond of Rome, you know,’ Osmond said; ‘but there’s nothing I like better than to meet people who haven’t that superstition. The modern world’s after all very fine. Now you’re thoroughly modern and yet are not at all common. So many of the moderns we see are such very poor stuff. If they’re the children of the future we’re willing to die young. Of course the ancients too are often very tiresome. My wife and I like everything that’s really new—not the mere pretence of it. There’s nothing new, unfortunately, in ignorance and stupidity. We see plenty of that in forms that offer themselves as a revelation of progress, of light. A revelation of vulgarity!

I’m talking for my wife as well as for myself, you see. She speaks for me, my wife; why shouldn’t I speak for her? We’re as united, you know, as the candlestick and the snuffers.

It was true that Goodwood had at times grimly wished he were dead and would have liked to kill him; but Osmond had no means of knowing this, for practice had made the younger man perfect in the art of appearing inaccessible to-day to any violent emotion. He cultivated this art in order to deceive himself, but it was others that he deceived first. He cultivated it, moreover, with very limited success; of which there could be no better proof than the deep, dumb irritation that reigned in his soul when he heard Osmond speak of his wife’s feelings as if he were commissioned to answer for them.

‘May I not say a word to you now?’ Goodwood presently asked her. She got up immediately, smiling. ‘Certainly, we’ll go somewhere else if you like.’ They went together, leaving the Countess with her little circle, and for a moment after they had crossed the threshold neither of them spoke. Isabel would not sit down; she stood in the middle of the room slowly fanning herself; she had for him the same familiar grace. She seemed to wait for him to speak. Now that he was alone with her all the passion he had never stifled surged into his senses; it hummed in his eyes and made things swim round him. The bright, empty room grew dim and blurred, and through the heaving veil he felt her hover before him with gleaming eyes and parted lips. If he had seen more distinctly he would have perceived her smile was fixed and a trifle forced—that she was frightened at what she saw in his own face. ‘I suppose you wish to bid me good-bye?’ she said.

But I do ask one sole satisfaction: that you tell me—that you tell me—!’ ‘That I tell you what?’ ‘Whether I may pity you.’ ‘Should you like that?’ Isabel asked, trying to smile again. ‘To pity you? Most assuredly! That at least would be doing something. I’d give my life to it.’ She raised her fan to her face, which it covered all except her eyes. They rested a moment on his. ‘Don’t give your life to it; but give a thought to it every now and then.’ And with that she went back to the Countess Gemini.

More clearly than ever before Isabel heard a cold, mocking voice proceed from she knew not where, in the dim void that surrounded her, and declare that this bright, strong, definite, worldly woman, this incarnation of the practical, the personal, the immediate, was a powerful agent in her destiny.

She was nearer to her than Isabel had yet discovered, and her nearness was not the charming accident she had so long supposed. The sense of accident indeed had died within her that day when she happened to be struck with the manner in which the wonderful lady and her own husband sat together in private.

It will perhaps seem to the reader that Isabel went fast in casting doubt, on mere suspicion, on a sincerity proved by several years of good offices. She moved quickly indeed, and with reason, for a strange truth was filtering into her soul. Madame Merle’s interest was identical with Osmond’s: that was enough.

‘It isn’t information I want. At bottom it’s sympathy. I had set my heart on that marriage; the idea did what so few things do—it satisfied the imagination.’ ‘Your imagination, yes. But not that of the persons concerned.’

Isabel sat there looking up at her, without rising; her face was almost a prayer to be enlightened. But the light of this woman’s eyes seemed only a darkness. ‘Oh misery!’ she murmured at last; and she fell back, covering her face with her hands. It had come over her like a high-surging wave that Mrs Touchett was right. Madame Merle had married her. Before she uncovered her face again that lady had left the room.

On such occasions she had several resorts; the most accessible of which perhaps was a seat on the low parapet which edges the wide grassy space before the high, cold front of Saint John Lateran, whence you look across the Campagna* at the far-trailing outline of the Alban Mount and at that mighty plain, between, which is still so full of all that has passed from it.

He got up as he spoke and walked to the chimney, where he stood a moment bending his eye, as if he had seen them for the first time, on the delicate specimens of rare porcelain with which it was covered. He took up a small cup and held it in his hand; then, still holding it and leaning his arm on the mantel, he pursued: ‘You always see too much in everything; you overdo it; you lose sight of the real. I’m much simpler than you think.’ ‘I think you’re very simple.’ And Madame Merle kept her eye on her cup. ‘I’ve come to that with time. I judged you, as I say, of old; but it’s only since your marriage that I’ve understood you. I’ve seen better what you have been to your wife than I ever saw what you were for me. Please be very careful of that precious object.’* ‘It already has a wee bit of a tiny crack,’ said Osmond dryly as he put it down.

After he had left her she went, the first thing, and lifted from the mantel-shelf the attenuated coffee-cup in which he had mentioned the existence of a crack; but she looked at it rather abstractedly. ‘Have I been so vile all for nothing?’ she vaguely wailed.*

Isabel gave an extreme attention to this little sketch; she found it indeed intensely interesting. It seemed to show her how far her husband’s desire to be effective was capable of going—to the point of playing theoretic tricks on the delicate organism of his daughter. She could not understand his purpose, no—not wholly; but she understood it better than he supposed or desired, inasmuch as she was convinced that the whole proceeding was an elaborate mystification, addressed to herself and destined to act upon her imagination.

and show that if he regarded his daughter as a precious work of art it was natural he should be more and more careful about the finishing touches.

Osmond took a sip of a glass of wine; he looked perfectly good humoured. ‘My dear Amy,’ he answered, smiling as if he were uttering a piece of gallantry, ‘I don’t know anything about your convictions, but if I suspected that they interfere with mine it would be much simpler to banish you.’

Osmond was seated at the table near the window with a folio volume before him, propped against a pile of books. This volume was open at a page of small coloured plates, and Isabel presently saw that he had been copying from it the drawing of an antique coin. A box of water-colours and fine brushes lay before him, and he had already transferred to a sheet of immaculate paper the delicate, finely-tinted disk. His back was turned toward the door, but he recognised his wife without looking round.

‘So I believed—though it was hard to believe. Had it never occurred to you that he was for six or seven years her lover?’ ‘I don’t know. Things have occurred to me, and perhaps that was what they all meant.’

Isabel got up, expecting to see one of the ladies of the sisterhood, but to her extreme surprise found herself confronted with Madame Merle. The effect was strange, for Madame Merle was already so present to her vision that her appearance in the flesh was like suddenly, and rather awfully, seeing a painted picture move.

Madame Merle had guessed in the space of an instant that everything was at an end between them, and in the space of another instant she had guessed the reason why. The person who stood there was not the same one she had seen hitherto, but was a very different person—a person who knew her secret. This discovery was tremendous, and from the moment she made it the most accomplished of women faltered and lost her courage. But only for that moment. Then the conscious stream of her perfect manner gathered itself again and flowed on as smoothly as might be to the end.

Isabel saw it all as distinctly as if it had been reflected in a large clear glass.

When Madame Catherine had left them together Pansy kneeled down and hid her head in her stepmother’s lap. So she remained some moments, while Isabel gently stroked her hair. Then she got up, averting her face and looking about the room. ‘Don’t you think I’ve arranged it well? I’ve everything I have at home.’

She waited a long time; Mrs Touchett appeared in no hurry to come to her. She grew impatient at last; she grew nervous and scared—as scared as if the objects about her had begun to show for conscious things, watching her trouble with grotesque grimaces.

He has a man who’s supposed to look after him, but the man’s good for nothing; he’s always looking out of the window—as if there were anything to see!

Her imagination had traversed half Europe; it halted, panting, and even trembling a little, in the city of Rome. She figured herself announcing to her husband that Lord Warburton was to lead a bride to the altar, and she was of course not aware how extremely wan she must have looked while she made this intellectual effort.

‘I always understood,’ he continued, ‘though it was so strange—so pitiful. You wanted to look at life for yourself—but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!’

One afternoon, in the library, about a week after the ceremony in the churchyard, she was trying to fix it for an hour; but her eyes often wandered from the book in her hand to the open window, which looked down the long avenue. It was in this way that she saw a modest vehicle approach the door and perceived Lord Warburton sitting, in rather an uncomfortable attitude, in a corner of it.

She was in no humour for visitors and, if she had had a chance, would have drawn back behind one of the great trees. But she saw she had been seen and that nothing was left her but to advance.

There was nothing to recall her to the house; the two ladies, in their seclusion, dined early and had tea at an indefinite hour. How long she had sat in this position she could not have told you; but the twilight had grown thick when she became aware that she was not alone. She quickly straightened herself, glancing about, and then saw what had become of her solitude. She was sharing it with Caspar Goodwood, who stood looking at her, a few yards off, and whose footfall on the unresonant turf, as he came near, she had not heard.