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obvious kind; but even if one had not the journalistic tal-
ent and a genius for guessing, as Henrietta said, what the
public was going to want, one was not therefore to conclude
that one had no vocation, no beneficent aptitude of any sort,
and resign one’s self to being frivolous and hollow. Isabel
was stoutly determined not to be hollow. If one should wait
with the right patience one would find some happy work to
one’s hand. Of course, among her theories, this young lady
was not without a collection of views on the subject of mar-
riage. The first on the list was a conviction of the vulgarity
of thinking too much of it. From lapsing into eagerness on
this point she earnestly prayed she might be delivered; she
held that a woman ought to be able to live to herself, in the
absence of exceptional flimsiness, and that it was perfectly
possible to be happy without the society of a more or less
coarse-minded person of another sex. The girl’s prayer was
very sufficiently answered; something pure and proud that
there was in her—something cold and dry an unappreciat-
ed suitor with a taste for analysis might have called it—had
hitherto kept her from any great vanity of conjecture on the
article of possible husbands. Few of the men she saw seemed
worth a ruinous expenditure, and it made her smile to
think that one of them should present himself as an incen-
tive to hope and a reward of patience. Deep in her soul—it
was the deepest thing there—lay a belief that if a certain
light should dawn she could give herself completely; but this
image, on the whole, was too formidable to be attractive.
Isabel’s thoughts hovered about it, but they seldom rested
on it long; after a little it ended in alarms. It often seemed to

72 The Portrait of a Lady