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ise you to do it justice.’
‘That’s all I ask of you, of course—and that you’ll remem-
ber how absolutely my happiness is in your hands.’
Isabel listened with extreme respect to this admonition,
but she said after a minute: ‘I must tell you that what I shall
think about is some way of letting you know that what you
ask is impossibleletting you know it without making you
miserable.’
‘There’s no way to do that, Miss Archer. I won’t say that if
you refuse me you’ll kill me; I shall not die of it. But I shall
do worse; I shall live to no purpose.
‘You’ll live to marry a better woman than I.’
‘Don’t say that, please,’ said Lord Warburton very grave-
ly. ‘That’s fair to neither of us.’
‘To marry a worse one then.’
‘If there are better women than you I prefer the bad ones.
That’s all I can say,’ he went on with the same earnestness.
‘There’s no accounting for tastes.’
His gravity made her feel equally grave, and she showed
it by again requesting him to drop the subject for the pres-
ent. ‘I’ll speak to you myself—very soon. Perhaps I shall
write to you.’
‘At your convenience, yes,’ he replied. ‘Whatever time
you take, it must seem to me long, and I suppose I must
make the best of that.’
‘I shall not keep you in suspense; I only want to collect
my mind a little.’
He gave a melancholy sigh and stood looking at her a
moment, with his hands behind him, giving short nervous

152 The Portrait of a Lady