Page:The Portrait of a Lady (London, Macmillan & Co., 1881) Volume 1.djvu/183

 "Not in the usual sense. It is getting—getting—getting a great deal. But it is giving up other chances."

Other chances?" Lord Warburton repeated, more and more puzzled.

"I don't mean chances to marry," said Isabel, her colour rapidly coming back to her. And then she stooped down with a deep frown, as if it were hopeless to attempt to make her meaning clear.

"I don't think it is presumptuous in me to say that I think you will gain more than you will lose," Lord Warburton observed.

"I can't escape unhappiness," said Isabel. "In marrying you, I shall be trying to."

"I don't know whether you would try to, but you certainly would: that I must in candour admit!" Lord Warburton exclaimed, with an anxious laugh.

"I must not—I can't!" cried the girl.

"Well, if you are bent on being miserable, I don't see why you should make me so. Whatever charms unhappiness may have for you, it has none for me."

"I am not bent on being miserable," said Isabel. "I have always been intensely determined to be happy, and I have often believed I should be. I have told people that; you can ask them. But it comes over me every now and then that I can never be happy in any extraordinary way; not by turning away, by separating myself."

"By separating yourself from what?"

"From life. From the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer."

Lord Warburton broke into a smile that almost denoted hope.

"Why, my dear Miss Archer," he began to explain, with the