Page 585 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

Chapter 41

Osmond touched on this matter that evening for the first
time; coming very late into the drawing-room, where she
was sitting alone. They had spent the evening at home, and
Pansy had gone to bed; he himself had been sitting since
dinner in a small apartment in which he had arranged his
books and which he called his study. At ten o’clock Lord
Warburton had come in, as he always did when he knew
from Isabel that she was to be at home; he was going some-
where else and he sat for half an hour. Isabel, after asking
him for news of Ralph, said very little to him, on purpose;
she wished him to talk with her stepdaughter. She pretend-
ed to read; she even went after a little to the piano; she asked
herself if she mightn’t leave the room. She had come little by
little to think well of the idea of Pansy’s becoming the wife
of the master of beautiful Lockleigh, though at first it had
not presented itself in a manner to excite her enthusiasm.
Madame Merle, that afternoon, had applied the match to
an accumulation of inflammable material. When Isabel was
unhappy she always looked about her-partly from impulse
and partly by theory-for some form of positive exertion.
She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness
was a state of disease-of suffering as opposed to doing. To
‘do’-it hardly mattered what-would therefore be an escape,
perhaps in some degree a remedy. Besides, she wished to

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