Page 494 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

purpose to remonstrate; from Lord Warburton, who would
certainly console himself, and from Caspar Goodwood,
who perhaps would not; from her aunt, who had cold, shal-
low ideas about marriage, for which she was not sorry to
display her contempt; and from Ralph, whose talk about
having great views for her was surely but a whimsical cov-
er for a personal disappointment. Ralph apparently wished
her not to marry at all-that was what it really meant-because
he was amused with the spectacle of her adventures as a sin-
gle woman. His disappointment made him say angry things
about the man she had preferred even to him: Isabel flat-
tered herself that she believed Ralph had been angry. It was
the more easy for her to believe this because, as I say, she
had now little free or unemployed emotion for minor needs,
and accepted as an incident, in fact quite as an ornament,
of her lot the idea that to prefer Gilbert Osmond as she pre-
ferred him was perforce to break all other ties. She tasted of
the sweets of this preference, and they made her conscious,
almost with awe, of the invidious and remorseless tide of
the charmed and possessed condition, great as was the tra-
ditional honour and imputed virtue of being in love. It was
the tragic part of happiness; one’s right was always made of
the wrong of some one else.
The elation of success, which surely now flamed high in
Osmond, emitted meanwhile very little smoke for so bril-
liant a blaze. Contentment, on his part, took no vulgar
form; excitement, in the most self-conscious of men, was
a kind of ecstasy of self-control. This disposition, however,
made him an admirable lover; it gave him a constant view

494 The Portrait of a Lady