Page 399 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

candidly confessed that he regarded the affair as a positive
intellectual adventure. He liked Miss Stackpole extremely;
he thought she had a wonderful head on her shoulders, and
found great comfort in the society of a woman who was
not perpetually thinking about what would be said and
how what she did, how what they did—and they had done
things!—would look. Miss Stackpole never cared how any-
thing looked, and, if she didn’t care, pray why should he?
But his curiosity had been roused; he wanted awfully to see
if she ever would care. He was prepared to go as far as she—
he didn’t see why he should break down first.
Henrietta showed no signs of breaking down. Her pros-
pects had brightened on her leaving England, and she was
now in the full enjoyment of her copious resources. She had
indeed been obliged to sacrifice her hopes with regard to
the inner life; the social question, on the Continent, bris-
tled with difficulties even more numerous than those she
had encountered in England. But on the Continent there
was the outer life, which was palpable and visible at every
turn, and more easily convertible to literary uses than the
customs of those opaque islanders. Out of doors in for-
eign lands, as she ingeniously remarked, one seemed to
see the right side of the tapestry; out of doors in England
one seemed to see the wrong side, which gave one no no-
tion of the figure. The admission costs her historian a pang,
but Henrietta, despairing of more occult things, was now
paying much attention to the outer life. She had been study-
ing it for two months at Venice, from which city she sent
to the Interviewer a conscientious account of the gondolas,

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