Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/52

44 *4 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. viewer. Henrietta, for Isabel, was chiefly a proof that a woman might suffice to herself and be happy. Her resources were of the obvious kind ; but even if one had not the journalistic talent and a genius for guessing, as Henrietta said, what the public was going to want, one was not therefore to conclude that one had no vocation, no beneficent aptitude of any sort, and resign oneself to being trivial and superficial. Isabel was reso- lutely determined not to be superficial. If one should wait expectantly and trustfully, one would find some happy work to one's hand. Of course, among her theories, this young lady was not without a collection of opinions on the question of marriage. The fkst on the list was a .conviction that it was very vulgar to think too much about it. From lapsing into a state of eagerness on this point she earnestly prayed that she might be delivered ; she held that a woman ought to be able to make up her life in singleness, and that it was perfectly possible to be happy with- out the society of a more or less coarse-minded person of another sex. The girl's prayer was very sufficiently answered ; some- thing pure and proud that there was in her something cold and stiff, an unappreciated suitor with a taste for analysis might have called it had hitherto kept her from any great vanity of conjec- ture on the suVJject of possible husbands. Few of the men she saw seemed worth an expenditure of imagination, and it made her smile to think that one of them should present himself as an incentive to hope and a reward of patience. Deep in her soul it was the deepest thing there lay a belief that if a certain light should dawn, she could give herself completely ; but this image, on the whole, was too formidable to be attractive. Isabel's thoughts hovered about it, but they seldom rested on it long ; after a little it ended by frightening her. It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself ; you could have made her blush, any day in the year, by telling her that she was selfish. She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress. Her nature had for her own imagination a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one's mind was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses. But she was often reminded that there were other gardens in the world than those of her virginal soul, and that there were, moreover, a great many places that were not gardens at all only dusky, pestiferous tracts, planted thick with ugliness and misery. In the current of that easy eagerness on