Page:The Portrait of a Lady (London, Macmillan & Co., 1881) Volume 2.djvu/193

 destiny for you. There was to be nothing of this sort in it. You were not to come down so easily, so soon."

"To come down? What strange expressions you use! Is that your description of my marriage?"

"It expresses my idea of it. You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue—to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud—a missile that should never have reached you—and down you drop to the ground. It hurts me," said Ralph, audaciously, "as if I had fallen myself!"

The look of pain and bewilderment deepened in his companion's face.

"I don't understand you in the least," she repeated. "You say you amused yourself with planning out my future—I don't understand that. Don't amuse yourself too much, or I shall think you are doing it at my expense."

Ralph shook his head.

"I am not afraid of your not believing that I have had great ideas for you."

"What do you mean by my soaring and sailing?" the girl asked. "I have never moved on a higher line than I am moving on now. There is nothing higher for a girl than to marry a—a person she likes," said poor Isabel, wandering into the didactic.

"It's your liking the person we speak of that I venture to criticise, my dear Isabel! I should have said that the man for you would have been a more active, larger, freer sort of nature." Ralph hesitated a moment, then he added, "I can't get over the belief that there's something small in Osmond."

He had uttered these last words with a tremor of the voice; he was afraid that she would flash out again. But to his surprise she was quiet; she had the air of considering.