Page 184 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

‘I don’t understand. Why should not that be your fate as
well as anything else?’
‘Because it’s not,’ said Isabel femininely. ‘I know it’s not.
It’s not my fate to give up—I know it can’t be.’
Poor Lord Warburton stared, an interrogative point in
either eye. ‘Do you call marrying me giving up?’
‘Not in the usual sense. It’s getting—getting—getting a
great deal. But it’s giving up other chances.’
‘Other chances for what?’
‘I don’t mean chances to marry,’ said Isabel, her colour
quickly coming back to her. And then she stopped, looking
down with a deep frown, as if it were hopeless to attempt to
make her meaning clear.
‘I don’t think it presumptuous in me to suggest that you’ll
gain more than you’ll lose,’ her companion observed.
‘I can’t escape unhappiness,’ said Isabel. ‘In marrying
you I shall be trying to.’
‘I don’t know whether you’d try to, but you certainly
would: that I must in candour admit!’ he exclaimed with an
anxious laugh.
‘I mustn’t—I can’t!’ cried the girl.
‘Well, if you’re bent on being miserable I don’t see why
you should make me so. Whatever charms a life of misery
may have for you, it has none for me.’
‘I’m not bent on a life of misery,’ said Isabel. ‘I’ve always
been intensely determined to be happy, and I’ve often be-
lieved I should be. I’ve told people that; you can ask them.
But it comes over me every now and then that I can never
be happy in any extraordinary way; not by turning away, by

184 The Portrait of a Lady