THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 471 have every reason for going. I can't tell you how unjust you seem to me. But I think you know. It is your own opposition that is calculated. It is malignant." She had never uttered her worst thought to her husband before, and the sensation of hearing it was evidently new to Osmond. But he showed no surprise, and his coolness was apparently a proof that he had believed his wife would in fact be unable to resist for ever his ingenious endeavour to draw her out. "It is all the more intense, then," he answered. And he added, almost as if he were giving her a friendly counsel " This is a very important matter." She recognised this ; she was fully conscious of the weight of the occasion ; she knew that between them they had arrived at a crisis. Its gravity made her careful; she said nothing, and he went on. " You say I have no reason ? I have the very best. I dislike, from the bottom of my soul, what you intend to do. It's dishonour- able ; it's indelicate ; it's indecent. Your cousin is nothing whatever to me. and I am under no obligation to make conces- sions to him. I have already made the very handsomest. Your relations with him, while he was here, kept me on pins and needles ; but I let that pass, because from week to week I expected him to go. I have never liked him and he has never liked me. That's why you like him because he hates me," said Osmond, with a quick, barely audible tremor in his voice. " I have an ideal of what my wife should do and should not do. She should not travel across Europe alone, in defiance of my deepest desire, to sit at the bedside of other men. Your cousin is nothing to you ; he is nothing to us. You smile most express- ively when I talk about us ; but I assure you that we, we, is all that I know. I take our marriage seriously ; you appear to have found a way of not doing so. I am not aware that we are divorced or separated ; for me we are indissolubly united. You are nearer to me than any human creature, and I am nearer to you. It may be a disagreeable proximity ; it's one, at any rate, of our own deliberate making. You don't like to be reminded of that, I know; but I am perfectly willing, because because " And Osmond paused a moment, looking as if he had something to say which would be very much to the point. " Because I think we , should accept the consequences of our actions, and what I value most in life is the honour of a thing ! " He spoke gravely and almost gently ; the accent of sarcasm had dropped out of his tone. It had a gravity which checked nis wife's quick emotion ; the resolution with which she had
