Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/71

IX THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 63 young ladies. The most cultivated is his taste for the new views. It affords him a great deal of entertainment more perhaps than anythin'g else, except the young ladies. His old house over there what does he call it, Lockleigh 1 ? is very attractive ; but I don't think it is as pleasant as this. That doesn't matter, however lie has got so many others. His views don't hurt any one as far as I can see ; they certainly don't hurt himself. And if there were to be a revolution, he would come off very easily ; they wouldn't touch him, they would leave him as he is ; he is too much liked." " Ah, he couldn't be a martyr even if he wished ! " Isabel exclaimed. " That's a very poor position." " He will never be a martyr unless you make him one," said the old man. Isabel shook her head ; there might have been something laughable in the fact that she did it with a touch of sadness. " I shall never make any one a martyr." " You will never be one, I hope." " I hope not. But you don't pity Lord Warburton, then, as Ralph does 1 " Her uncle looked at her a while, with genial acuteness. "Yes, I do, after all!" IX. THE two Misses Molyneux, this nobleman's sisters, came presently to call upon her, and Isabel took a fancy to the young ladies, who appeared to her to have a very original stamp. It is true that, when she spoke of them to her cousin as original, he declared that no epithet could be less applicable than this to the two Misses Molyneux, for that there were fifty thousand young women in England who exactly resembled them. Deprived of this advantage, however, Isabel's visitors retained that of an extreme sweetness and shyness of demeanour, and of having, as she thought, the kindest eyes in the world. "They are not morbid, at any rate, whatever they are," our heroine said to herself ; and she deemed this a great charm, for two or three of the friends of her girlhood had been regrettably open to the charge (they would have been so nice without it), to say nothing of Isabel's having occasionally suspected that it might become a fault of her own. The Misses Molyneux were not in their first youth, but they had bright, fresh complexions,