Page 833 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

I want you to think of me.’
‘To think of ‘you’?’ Isabel said, standing before him in
the dusk. The idea of which she had caught a glimpse a few
moments before now loomed large. She threw back her head
a little; she stared at it as if it had been a comet in the sky.
‘You don’t know where to turn. Turn straight to me. I
want to persuade you to trust me,’ Goodwood repeated.
And then he paused with his shining eyes. ‘Why should you
go back-why should you go through that ghastly form?’
‘To get away from you!’ she answered. But this expressed
only a little of what she felt. The rest was that she had never
been loved before. She had believed it, but this was different;
this was the hot wind of the desert, at the approach of which
the others dropped dead, like mere sweet airs of the garden.
It wrapped her about; it lifted her off her feet, while the very
taste of it, as of something potent, acrid and strange, forced
open her set teeth.
At first, in rejoinder to what she had said, it seemed to
her that he would break out into greater violence. But after
an instant he was perfectly quiet; he wished to prove he was
sane, that he had reasoned it all out. ‘I want to prevent that,
and I think I may, if you’ll only for once listen to me. It’s too
monstrous of you to think of sinking back into that misery,
of going to open your mouth to that poisoned air. It’s you
that are out of your mind. Trust me as if I had the care of
you. Why shouldn’t we be happy-when it’s here before us,
when it’s so easy? I’m yours for ever-for ever and ever. Here
I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. What have you to care about?
You’ve no children; that perhaps would be an obstacle. As it

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