Page 462 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

matter well out, making it perfectly clear that she broke no
faith and falsified no contract; but for all this she was afraid
of her visitor. She was ashamed of her fear; but she was de-
voutly thankful there was nothing else to be ashamed of. He
looked at her with his stiff insistence, an insistence in which
there was such a want of tact; especially when the dull dark
beam in his eye rested on her as a physical weight.
‘No, I didn’t feel that; I couldn’t think of you as dead. I
wish I could! he candidly declared.
‘I thank you immensely.’
‘I’d rather think of you as dead than as married to an-
other man.’
‘That’s very selfish of you!’ she returned with the ardour
of a real conviction. ‘If you’re not happy yourself others have
yet a right to be.’
‘Very likely it’s selfish; but I don’t in the least mind your
saying so. I don’t mind anything you can say now—I don’t
feel it. The cruellest things you could think of would be
mere pin-pricks. After what you’ve done I shall never feel
anything—I mean anything but that. That I shall feel all my
life.’
Mr. Goodwood made these detached assertions with
dry deliberateness, in his hard, slow American tone, which
flung no atmospheric colour over propositions intrinsically
crude. The tone made Isabel angry rather than touched her;
but her anger perhaps was fortunate, inasmuch as it gave
her a further reason for controlling herself It was under the
pressure of this control that she became, after a little, irrel-
evant. ‘When did you leave New York?’

462 The Portrait of a Lady