Page 768 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

occurred to you that he was for six or seven years her lov-
er?’
‘I don’t know. Things have occurred to me, and perhaps
that was what they all meant.’
‘She has been wonderfully clever, she has been magnifi-
cent, about Pansy!’ the Countess, before all this view of it,
cried.
‘Oh, no idea, for me,’ Isabel went on, ‘ever definitely took
that form.’ She appeared to be making out to herself what
had been and what hadn’t. ‘And as it is-I don’t understand.’
She spoke as one troubled and puzzled, yet the poor
Countess seemed to have seen her revelation fall below its
possibilities of effect. She had expected to kindle some re-
sponsive blaze, but had barely extracted a spark.
Isabel showed as scarce more impressed than she might
have been, as a young woman of approved imagination,
with some fine sinister passage of public history. ‘Don’t
you recognize how the child could never pass for her
husband’s?-that is with M. Merle himself,’ her companion
resumed. ‘They had been separated too long for that, and
he had gone to some far country-I think to South America.
If she had ever had children-which I’m not sure of-she had
lost them. The conditions happened to make it workable,
under stress (I mean at so awkward a pinch), that Osmond
should acknowledge the little girl. His wife was dead-very
true; but she had not been dead too long to put a certain
accommodation of dates out of the question-from the mo-
ment, I mean, that suspicion wasn’t started; which was what
they had to take care of. What was more natural than that

768 The Portrait of a Lady