Page 438 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

He had repeated the announcement in a tone of almost
impersonal discretion, like a man who expected very little
from it but who spoke for his own needed relief. The tears
came into her eyes: this time they obeyed the sharpness of
the pang that suggested to her somehow the slipping of a
fine bolt—backward, forward, she couldn’t have said which.
The words he had uttered made him, as he stood there,
beautiful and generous, invested him as with the golden air
of early autumn; but, morally speaking, she retreated before
them—facing him still—as she had retreated in the other
cases before a like encounter. ‘Oh don’t say that, please,’ she
answered with an intensity that expressed the dread of hav-
ing, in this case too, to choose and decide. What made her
dread great was precisely the force which, as it would seem,
ought to have banished all dread—the sense of something
within herself, deep down, that she supposed to be inspired
and trustful passion. It was there like a large sum stored in
a bankwhich there was a terror in having to begin to spend.
If she touched it, it would all come out.
‘I haven’t the idea that it will matter much to you,’ said
Osmond. ‘I’ve too little to offer you. What I have—it’s
enough for me; but it’s not enough for you. I’ve neither for-
tune, nor fame, nor extrinsic advantages of any kind. So I
offer nothing. I only tell you because I think it can’t offend
you, and some day or other it may give you pleasure. It gives
me pleasure, I assure you,’ he went on, standing there before
her, considerately inclined to her, turning his hat, which he
had taken up, slowly round with a movement which had all
the decent tremor of awkwardness and none of its oddity,

438 The Portrait of a Lady