Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/385

377 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 377 that people should seek for justice in such different quarters. His ideal was a conception of high prosperity and propriety, of the aristocratic life, which she now saw that Osmond deemed himself always, in essence at least, to have led. He had never lapsed from it for an hour ; he would never have recovered from the shame of doing so. That again was very well; here too she would have agreed ; hut they attached such different ideas, such different associations and desires, to the same formulas. Her notion of the aristocratic life was simply the union of great know- ledge with great liberty ; the knowledge would give one a sense of duty, and the liberty a sense of enjoyment. But for Osmond it was altogether a thing of forms, a conscious, calculated attitude. He was fond of the old, the consecrated, and transmitted ; so was she, but she pretended to do what she chose with it. He had an immense esteem for tradition; he had told her once that the best thing in the world was to have it, but that if one was so unfortunate as not to have it, one must immediately proceed to make it. She knew that he meant by this that she hadn't it, but that he was better off; though where he had got his tradi- tions she never learned. He had a very large collection of them, however ; that was very certain ; after a little she began to see. The great thing was to act in accordance with them ; the great thing not only for him but for her.* Isabel had an undefined conviction that, to serve for another person than their proprietor, traditions must be of a thoroughly superior kind ; but she never- theless assented to this intimation that she too must march to the stately music that floated down from unknown periods in her husband's past ; she who of old had been so free of step, so desultory, so devious, so much the reverse of processional. There were certain things they must do, a certain posture they must take, certain people they must know and not know. When Isabel saw this rigid system closing about her, draped though it was in pictured tapestries, that sense of darkness and suffocation of which I have spoken took possession of her ; she seemed to be shut up with an odour of mould and decay. She had resisted, of course ; at first very humorously, ironically, tenderly ; then as the situation grew more serious, eagerly, passionately, pleadingly. She had pleaded the cause of freedom, of doing as they chose, of not caring for the aspect and denomination of their life the cause of other instincts and longings, of quite another i'Jeal. Then it was that her husband's personality, touched as it never had been, stepped forth and- stood erect. The things that she had said were answered only by his scorn, and she could see that he was ineffably ashamed of her. What did he think of her