Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/384

376 376 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. not physical suffering ; for physical suffering there might have been a remedy. She could come and go ; she had her Jiberty ; her husband was perfectly polite. He took himself so seriously ; it was something appalling. Under all his culture, his clever- ness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his know- ledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers. She had taken him seriously, but she had not taken him so seriously as that. How could she especially when she knew him better 1 ? She was to think of him as .he thought of himself as the first gentleman in Europe. So it was that she had thought of him at first, and that indeed was the reason she had married him. But when she began to see what it implied, she drew back ; there was more in the bond than she had meant to put her name to. It implied a sovereign contempt for every one but some three or four very exalted people whom he envied, and for everything in the world but half-a-dozen ideas of his own. That was very well ; she would have gone with him even there, a long distance ; for he pointed out to her so much of the baseness and shabbiness of life, opened her eyes so wide to the stupidity, the depravity, the ignorance of mankind, that she had been properly impressed with the infinite vulgarity of things, and of the virtue of keeping one's self unspotted by it. But this base, ignoble world, it appeared, was after all what one was to live for ; one was to keep it for ever in one's eye, in order, not to enlighten, or convert, or redeem it, but to extract from it some recognition of one's own superiority. On the one hand it was despicable, but on the other it afforded a standard. Osmond had talked to Isabel about his renunciation, his indifference, the ease with which he dispensed with the usual aids to success ; and all this had seemed to her admirable. She had thought it a noble indifference, an exquisite independence. But indifference was really the last of his Dualities ; she had never seen any one who thought so much of others. For* herself, the world had always interested her, and the study of her fellow-creatures was 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 thsfla 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. He had his ideal, just as she had tried to have hers ; only it was strange