Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/36

28 28 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. all the others a parcel of fools. 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 communi- cation 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 conver- sation 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 quotation. 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 heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures a class of efforts to which she had often gone so far as to forgive much bad painting for the sake of the subject. While the Civil War went on, she was still a very young girl ; but she passed months of this long period in a state of almost passionate excitement, in which she felt herself at times (to her extreme confusion) stirred almost indiscriminately by the valour of either army. Of course the circumspection of the local youth had never gone the length of making her a social proscript; for the proportion of those whose hearts, as they approached her, beat only just fast enough to make it a sensible pleasure, was sufficient to redeem her maidenly career from failure. She had had everything that a girl could have : kindness, admiration, flattery, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing, the latest publica- tions, plenty of new dresses, the London Spectator, and a glimpse of contemporary aesthetics. These things now, as memory played over them, resolved themselves into a multitude of scenes and figures. Forgotten things came back to her; many others, which she had lately thought of great moment, dropped out of sight. The result was kaleidoscopic ; but the movement of the instrument was checked