478 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. "Poor woman and Pansy wh</ doesn't like her!" cried Isabel. " That's the reason she wanted some one whom Pansy would like. She knows it ; she knows everything." " Will she know that, you have told me this? " "That will depend upon whether you tell her. She is pre- pared for it, and do you know what she counts upon for her defence 1 On your thinking that I lie. Perhaps you do ; don't make yourself uncomfortable to hide it. Only, as it happens this time, I don't. I have told little fibs ; but they have never hurt any one but myself." Isabel sat staring at her companion's story as at a bale of fantastic wares that some strolling gipsy might have unpacked on the carpet at her feet. " Why did Osmond never marry her? " she asked, at last. " Because she had no money." The Countess had an answer for everything, and if she lied she lied well. " No one knows, no one has ever known, what she lives on, or how she has got all those beautiful things. I don't believe Osmond himself knows. Besides, she wouldn't have married him." " How can she have loved him then 1 " " She doesn't love him, in that way. She did at first, and then, I suppose, she would have married him ; but at that time her husband was living. By the time M. Merle had rejoined I won't say his ancestors, because he never had any her rela- tions with Osmond had changed, and she had grown more ambitious. She hoped she might marry a great man ; that has always been her idea. She has waited and watched and plotted and prayed ; but she has never succeeded. I don't call Madame Merle a success, you know. I don't know what she may accom- plish yet, but at present she has very little to show. The only tangible result she has ever achieved except, of course, getting to know every one and staying with them free of expense has, been her bringing you and Osmond together. Oh, she did that, my dear ; you needn't look as if you doubted it. I have watched them for years ; I know everything everything. I am thought a great scatterbrain^but I have had enough application of mind to follow up those two. She hates me, and her way of showing it is to pretend to be for ever defending me. When people say I have had fifteen lovers, she looks horrified, and declares that quite half of them were never proved. She has been afraid of me for years, and she has taken great comfort in the vile, false things that people have said about me. She has been afraid I would expose her, and she threatened me one day, when Osmond began.
