Page:The Portrait of a Lady (London, Macmillan & Co., 1881) Volume 1.djvu/221

 But whatever there was of grandeur in this speech moved Caspar Goodwood's admiration; there was nothing that displeased him in the sort of feeling it expressed. This feeling not only did no violence to his way of looking at the girl he wished to make his wife, but seemed a grace the more in so ardent a spirit. To his mind she had always had wings, and this was but the flutter of those stainless pinions. He was not afraid of having a wife with a certain largeness of movement; he was a man of long steps himself. Isabel's words, if they had been meant to shock him, failed of the mark, and only made him smile with the sense that here was common ground. "Who would wish less to curtail your liberty than I?" he asked. "What can give me greater pleasure than to see you perfectly independent—doing whatever you like? It is to make you independent that I want to marry you."

"That's a beautiful sophism," said the girl, with a smile more beautiful still.

"An unmarried woman—a girl of your age—is not independent. There are all sorts of things she can't do. She is hampered at every step."

"That's as she looks at the question," Isabel answered, with much spirit. "I am not in my first youth—I can do what I choose—I belong quite to the independent class. I have neither father nor mother; I am poor; I am of a serious disposition, and not pretty. I therefore am not bound to be timid and conventional; indeed I can't afford such luxuries. Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all. I don't wish to be a mere sheep in the flock; I wish to choose my fate and know something of human affairs beyond what other people think it compatible with propriety to tell me." She paused a moment, but