Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/95

87 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 87 certain alarm. This alarm was composed of several elements, not all of which were disagreeable ; she had indeed spent some days in analysing them, and had succeeded in separating the pleasant part of this idea of Lord's Warburton's making love to her from the painful. It may appear to some readers that the young lady AVRS both precipitate and unduly fastidious ; but the latter of these facts, if the charge be true, may serve to exonerate her from the discredit of the former. She was not eager to convince her- self that a territorial magnate, as she had heard Lord Warburton called, was smitten with her charms ; because a declaration from such a source would point to more questions than it would answer. She had received a strong impression of Lord Warburton's being a personage, and she had occupied herself in examining the idea. At the risk of making the reader smile, it must be said that there had been moments when the intimation that she was admired by a " personage " struck her as an aggression which she would rather have been spared. She had never known a personage before ; there were no personages in her native land. When she had thought of such matters as this, she had done so on the basis of character of what one likes in a gentleman's mind and in his talk. She herself was a character she could not help being aware of that ; and hitherto her visions of a completed life had concerned themselves largely with moral images things as to which the question would be whether. they pleased her soul. Lord Warburton loomed up before her, largely and brightly, as a collection of attributes and powers which were not to be measured by this simple rule, but which demanded a different sort of appreciation an appreciation which the girl, with her habit of judging quickly and freely, felt that she lacked the patience to bestow. Of course, there would be a short cut to it, and as Lord Warburton was evidently a very fine fellow, it would probably also be a safe cut. Isabel was able to say all this to herself, but she was unable to feel the force of it. What she felt was that a territorial, a political, a social magnate had conceived the design of drawing her into the system in which he lived and moved. A certain instinct, not imperious, but persuasive, told her to resist it murmured to her that virtually she had a system and an orbit of her own. It told her other things besides things which both contradicted and confirmed each other ; that a girl might lo much worse than trust herself to such a man as Lord War- burton, and that it would be very interesting to see something of his system from his own point of view ; that, on the other hand, however, there was evidently a great deal of it which she should regard only as an incumbrance, and that even in the whole there