Page 144 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

Lord Warburton seemed quite ready to walk, to sit or to
do anything that Isabel should propose, and he gave her this
assurance with his usual air of being particularly pleased
to exercise a social virtue. But he was, nevertheless, not in
command of his emotions, and as he strolled beside her for a
moment, in silence, looking at her without letting her know
it, there was something embarrassed in his glance and his
misdirected laughter. Yes, assuredly—as we have touched
on the point, we may return to it for a moment again—the
English are the most romantic people in the world and Lord
Warburton was about to give an example of it. He was about
to take a step which would astonish all his friends and dis-
please a great many of them, and which had superficially
nothing to recommend it. The young lady who trod the turf
beside him had come from a queer country across the sea
which he knew a good deal about; her antecedents, her as-
sociations were very vague to his mind except in so far as
they were generic, and in this sense they showed as distinct
and unimportant. Miss Archer had neither a fortune nor
the sort of beauty that justifies a man to the multitude, and
he calculated that he had spent about twenty-six hours in
her company. He had summed up all this—the perversi-
ty of the impulse, which had declined to avail itself of the
most liberal opportunities to subside, and the judgement of
mankind, as exemplified particularly in the more quickly-
judging half of it: he had looked these things well in the face
and then had dismissed them from his thoughts. He cared
no more for them than for the rosebud in his buttonhole. It
is the good fortune of a man who for the greater part of a

144 The Portrait of a Lady