Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/436

428 428 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. " You won't think so always," said Henrietta. " I don't know what great unhappiness might bring me to ; but it seems to me I shall always be ashamed. One must accept one's deeds. I married him before all the world ; I was per- fectly free ; it was impossible to do anything more deliberate. One can't change, that way," Isabel repeated. " You have changed, in spite of the impossibility. I hope you don't mean to say that you like him." Isabel hesitated a moment. " No, I don't like him. I can tell you, because I am weary of my secret. But that's enough ; I can't tell all the world." Henrietta gave a rich laugh. " Don't you think you are rather too considerate 1 ?" " It's not of him that I am considerate it's of myself ! " Isabel answered. It was not surprising that Gilbert Osmond should not have taken comfort in Miss Stackpole ; his instinct had naturally set him in opposition to a young lady capable of advising his wife to withdraw from the conjugal mansion. When she arrived in Rome he said to Isabel that he hoped she would leave her friend the interviewer, alone; and Isabel answered that he at least had nothing to fear from her. ,She said to Henrietta that as Osmond didn't like her she could not invite her to dine ; but they could easily see each other in other ways. Isabel received Miss Stackpole freely in her own sitting-room, and took her repeatedly to drive, face to face with Pansy, who, bending a little forward, on the opposite seat of the carriage, gazed at the celebrated authoress with a respectful attention which Henrietta occasionally found irritating. She complained to Isabel that Miss Osmond had a little look as if she should remember every- thing one said. " I don't want to be remembered that way," Miss Stackpole declared ; " I consider that my conversation refers only to the moment, like the morning papers. Your step- daughter, as she sits there, looks as if she kept all the back numbers and would bring them out some day against me." She could not bring herself to think favourably of Pansy, whose absence of initiative, of conversation, of personal claims, seemed to her, in a girl of twenty, unnatural and even sinister. Isabel presently saw that Osmond would have liked her to urge a little the cause of her friend, insist a little" upon his receiving her, so that he might appear to sutfer for good manners' sake. Her immediate acceptance of his objections put him too much in the wrong it being in effect one of the disadvantages of expressing contempt, that you cannot enjoy at the same time