Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/53

45 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 45 which she had lately been floating, which had conveyed her to this beautiful old England and might carry her much further still, she often checked herself with the thought of the thousands of people who were less happy than herself a thought which for the moment made her absorbing happiness appear to her a kind of immodesty. What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for oneself 1 Tt must be confessed that this question never held her long. She was too young, too impatient to live, too unacquainted with pain. She always returned to her theory that* a young woman whom after .all every one thought clever, should begin by getting a general impression of life. This was necessary to prevent mistakes, and after it should be secured she might make the unfortunate con- dition of others an object of special attention. England was a revelation to her, and she found herself as entertained as a child at a pantomime. In her infantine excur- sions to Europe she had seen only the Continent, and seen it from the nursery window ; Paris, not London, was her father's Mecca. The impressions of that time, moreover, had become faint and remote, and the old-world quality in everything that she now saw had all the charm of strangeness. Her uncle's house seemed a picture made real ; no refinement of the agree- able was lost upon Isabel ; the rich perfection of Gardencourt at once revealed a world and gratified a need. The large, low rooms, with brown ceilings and dusky corners, the deep em- brasures and curious casements, the quiet light on dark, polished panels, the deep greenness outside, that seemed always peep- ing in, the sense of well-ordered privacy, in the centre of a " property " a place where sounds were felicitously accidental, where the tread was muffled by the earth itself, and in the thick mild air all shrillness dropped out of conversation these things were much to the taste of our young lady, whose taste played a considerable part in her emotions. She formed a fast friendship with her uncle, and often sat by his chair when he had had it moved out to the lawn. He passed hours in the open air, sitting placidly with folded hands, like a good old man who had done his work and received his wages, and was trying to grow used to weeks and months made up only of off- days. Isabel amused him more than she suspected the effect she produced upon people was often different from what she supposed and he frequently gave himself the pleasure of making her chatter. It was by this term that he qualified her conversation, which had much of the vivacity observable in that of the young ladies of her country, to whom the ear of the world