Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/277

269 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. . 269 the false colours, the sham splendour, made him suffer. Isabel had taken in hand a volume of Ampere, presented, on their arrival in Rome, by Ralph ; but though she held it in her lap with her finger vaguely kept in the place, she was not impatient to go on with her reading. A lamp covered with a drooping veil of pink tissue-paper burned on the table beside her, and diffused a strange pale rosiness over the scene. " You say you will come back ; but who knows 1 " Gilbert Osmond said. " I think you are much more likely to start on your voyage round the world. You are under no obligation to come back ; you can do exactly what you choose ; you can roam, through space." " Well, Italy is a part of space," Isabel answered ; " I can take it on the way." " On the way round the world 1 No, don't do that. Don't put us into a parenthesis give us a chapter to ourselves. I don't want to see you on your travels. I would rather see you when they are over. I should like to see you when you are tired and satiated," Osmond added, in a moment. " I shall prefer you in that state." Isabel, with her eyes bent down, fingered the pages of M. Ampere a little. "You turn things into ridicule without seeming to do it, though not, I think, without intending it," she said at last. " You have no respect for my travels you think them ridiculous." "Where do you find that?" Isabel went on in the same tone, fretting the edge of her book with the paper-knife. "You see my ignorance, my blunders, the way I wander about as if the world belonged to me, simply because because it has been put into my power to do so. You don't think a woman ought to do that. You think it bold and ungraceful." " I think it beautiful," said Osmond. " You know my opinions I have treated you to enough of them. Don't you remember my telling you that one ought to make one's life a work of art 1 You looked rather shocked at first ; but then I told you that it was exactly what you seemed to me to be trying to do with your own life." Isabel looked up from her book. " What you despise most in the world is bad art." " Possibly. But yours seem to me very good." " If I were to go to Japan next winter, you would laugh at me," Isabel continued.