Page:The Portrait of a Lady (London, Macmillan & Co., 1881) Volume 2.djvu/144

 veil of pink tissue-paper burned on the table beside her, and diffused a strange pale rosiness over the scene.

"You say you will come back; but who knows?" Gilbert Osmond said. "I think you are much more likely to start on your voyage round the world. You are under no obligation to come back; you can do exactly what you choose; you can roam through space."

"Well, Italy is a part of space," Isabel answered; "I can take it on the way."

"On the way round the world? No, don't do that. Don't put us into a parenthesis—give us a chapter to ourselves. I don't want to see you on your travels. I would rather see you when they are over. I should like to see you when you are tired and satiated," Osmond added, in a moment. "I shall prefer you in that state."

Isabel, with her eyes bent down, fingered the pages of M. Ampère a little.

"You turn things into ridicule without seeming to do it, though not, I think, without intending it," she said at last. "You have no respect for my travels—you think them ridiculous."

"Where do you find that?"

Isabel went on in the same tone, fretting the edge of her book with the paper-knife.

"You see my ignorance, my blunders, the way I wander about as if the world belonged to me, simply because—because it has been put into my power to do so. You don't think a woman ought to do that. You think it bold and ungraceful."

"I think it beautiful," said Osmond. "You know my opinions—I have treated you to enough of them. Don't you remember my telling you that one ought to make one's life a