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134 134 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. I can imagine that at the end of ten years we might have a very pleasant correspondence. I shall have matured my epis- tolary style." Isabel looked away while she spoke these words, for she knew they were of a much less earnest cast than the countenance of her listener. Her eyes, however, at last came back to him, just as he said, very irrelevantly " Are you enjoying your visit to your uncle 1 " Very much indeed." She hesitated, and then she broke out with even, greater irrelevance, " What good do you expect tc get by insisting ? " " The good of not losing you." " You have no right to talk about losing what is not yours. And even from your own point of view," Isabel added, " you ought to know when to let one alone." " I displease you very much," said Caspar Goodwood gloomily ; not as if to provoke her to compassion for a man conscious of this blighting fact, but as if to set it well before himself, so that he might endeavour to act with his eyes upon it. " Yes, you displease me very much, and the worst is that it is needless." Isabel knew that his was not a soft nature, from which pin- pricks would draw blood ; and from the first of her acquaintance with him and of her having to defend herself against a certain air that he had of knowing better what was good for her than she knew herself, she had recognised the fact that perfect frank- ness was her best weapon. To attempt to spare his sensibility or to escape from him edgewise, as one might do from a man who had barred the way less sturdily this, in dealing with Caspar Goodwood, who would take everything of every sort that one might give him, was wasted agility. It was not that - he had not susceptibilities, but his passive surface, as well as his active, was large and firm, and he might always be trusted to dress his wounds himself. In measuring the effect of his suffering, one might always reflect that he had a sound constitution. " I cant reconcile myself to that," he said. There was a dangerous liberality about this ; for Isabel felt that it was quite open to him to say that he had not always displeased her. " I can't reconcile myself to it either, and it is not the state of things that ought to exist between us. If you would only try and banish me from your mind for a few months we should be on good terms again."