Page 458 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

tain that never was lifted; it was as if she had remained after
all something of a public performer, condemned to emerge
only in character and in costume. She had once said that
she came from a distance, that she belonged to the ‘old, old’
world, and Isabel never lost the impression that she was the
product of a different moral or social clime from her own,
that she had grown up under other stars.
She believed then that at bottom she had a different mo-
rality. Of course the morality of civilized persons has always
much in common; but our young woman had a sense in her
of values gone wrong or, as they said at the shops, marked
down. She considered, with the presumption of youth, that
a morality differing from her own must be inferior to it; and
this conviction was an aid to detecting an occasional flash of
cruelty, an occasional lapse from candour, in the conversa-
tion of a person who had raised delicate kindness to an art
and whose pride was too high for the narrow ways of de-
ception. Her conception of human motives might, in certain
lights, have been acquired at the court of some kingdom in
decadence, and there were several in her list of which our
heroine had not even heard. She had not heard of every-
thing, that was very plain; and there were evidently things
in the world of which it was not advantageous to hear. She
had once or twice had a positive scare; since it so affected
her to have to exclaim, of her friend, ‘Heaven forgive her,
she doesn’t understand me!’ Absurd as it may seem this dis-
covery operated as a shock, left her with a vague dismay in
which there was even an element of foreboding. The dis-
may of course subsided, in the light of some sudden proof of

458 The Portrait of a Lady