Page 441 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

And he paused a moment, smiling. ‘I should like to explain
it.’ Then with a sudden, quick, bright naturalness, ‘Do come
back again,’ he pleaded. ‘There are so many things we might
talk about.’
She stood there with lowered eyes. ‘What service did you
speak of just now?’
‘Go and see my little daughter before you leave Florence.
She’s alone at the villa; I decided not to send her to my sister,
who hasn’t at all my ideas. Tell her she must love her poor
father very much,’ said Gilbert Osmond gently.
‘It will be a great pleasure to me to go,’ Isabel answered.
‘I’ll tell her what you say. Once more good-bye.’
On this he took a rapid, respectful leave. When he had
gone she stood a moment looking about her and seated her-
self slowly and with an air of deliberation. She sat there till
her companions came back, with folded hands, gazing at the
ugly carpet. Her agitation—for it had not diminished—was
very still, very deep. What had happened was something
that for a week past her imagination had been going for-
ward to meet; but here, when it came, she stopped—that
sublime principle somehow broke down. The working of
this young lady’s spirit was strange, and I can only give it to
you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether natu-
ral. Her imagination, as I say, now hung back: there was a
last vague space it couldn’t cross—a dusky, uncertain tract
which looked ambiguous and even slightly treacherous, like
a moorland seen in the winter twilight. But she was to cross
it yet.

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