Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/386

378 378 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. that she was base, vulgar, ignoble 1 He at least knew now that she had no traditions ! It had not been in his prevision of things that she should reveal such flatness ; her sentiments were worthy of a radical newspaper or of a Unitarian preacher. The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park. He would rake the soil gently and water the flowers ; he would weed the beds and gather an occasional nosegay. It would be a pretty piece of property for a proprietor already far-reaching. He didn't wish her to be stupid. On the contrary, it was because she was clever that she had pleased him. But he expected her intelligence to operate altogether in his favour, and so far from desiring her mind to be a blank, he had nattered himself that it would be richly receptive. He had expected his wife to feel with him and for him, to enter into his opinions, his ambitions, his pre- ferences ; and Isabel was obliged to confess that this was no very unwarrantable demand on the part of a husband. But there were certain things she could never take in. To begin with, they were hideously unclean. She was not a daughter of the Puritans, but for all that she believed in such a thing as purity. It would appear that Osmond didn't ; some of his traditions made her push back her skirts. Did all women have lovers 1 Did they all lie, and even the best have their price 1 Were there only three or four that didn't deceive their husbands'? When Isabel heard such things she felt a greater scorn for them than for the gossip of a village-parlour a scorn that kept its freshness in a very tainted air. There was the taint of her sis- ter-in-law; did her husband judge only by the Countess Gemini] This lady very often lied, and she had practised deceptions which were not simply verbal. It was enough to find these facts assumed among Osmond's traditions, without giving them such "a general extension. It was her scorn of his assumptions it was that that made him draw himself up. He had plenty of contempt, and it was proper that his wife should be as well furnished ; but that she should turn the hot light of her dis- dain upon his own conception of things this was a danger he had not allowed for. .He Delieved he should have regulated her emotions before she came to that ; and Isabel could easily imagine how his ears scorched when he discovered that he had been too confident. When one had a wife who gave one that sensation there was nothing left but to hate her ! She was morally certain now that this feeling of hatred, which at first had been a refuge and a refreshment, had become the