/ THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 371 acquitted him ; she preferred to believe that he was in good faith. But if his admiration for Pansy was a delusion, this was scarcely better than its being an affectation. Isabel wandered among these ugly possibilities until she completely lost her way .; some of them, as she suddenly encountered .them, seemed ugly enough. Then she broke out of the labyrinth, rubbing her eyes, and declared that her imagination surely did her little honour, and that her husband's did him even less. Lord Warburton was as disinterested as he need be, and she was no more to him than she need wish. She would rest upon this until the contrary should be proved; proved more effectually than by a cynical intimation of Osmond's, Such a resolution, however, brought her this evening but little peace, for her soul was haunted with terrors which crowded to the foreground of thought as quickly as a place was made for them. What. had suddenly set them into livelier motion she hardly knew, unless it were the strange impression she had received in the afternoon of her husband and Madame Merle being in more direct communication than she suspected. This impression came back to her from time to time, and now she wondered that it had never come before. Besides this, her short interview with Osmond, half-an-hour before, was a striking example of his faculty for making everything wither that he touched, spoiling everything for her that he looked at., It was very well to undertake to give him a proof of loyalty ; the real fact was that the knowledge of his expecting a thing raised a pre- sumption against it. It was as if he had had the evil eye ; as if his presence were a blight and his favour a misfortune. Was the fault in himself, or oidy in the deep mistrust she had con- ceived for him ? This mistrust was the clearest result of their short married. life ; a gulf had opened between them over which they looked at each other with eyes that were on either side a declaration of the deception suffered. It was a strange opposi- tion, of the like of which she had never dreamed an opposition in which the vital principle of the one was a thing of contempt to the other. It was not her fault she had practised no deception ; she had only admired and believed. She had taken all the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark, narrow alley, with a dead wall at the end. Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction B B 2
