The Portrait of a Lady, vol 2 | Page 9

there raising his eyes to her.
"No, you may heed it now or never, as you please. But after all I must
say it now." She had turned away, but in the movement she had stopped
herself and dropped her gaze upon him. The two remained a while in
this situation, exchanging a long look --the large, conscious look of the
critical hours of life. Then he got up and came near her, deeply
respectful, as if he were afraid he had been too familiar. "I'm absolutely
in love with you."
He had repeated the announcement in a tone of almost impersonal
discretion, like a man who expected very little from it but who spoke
for his own needed relief. The tears came into her eyes: this time they
obeyed the sharpness of the pang that suggested to her somehow the
slipping of a fine bolt--backward, forward, she couldn't have said which.
The words he had uttered made him, as he stood there, beautiful and
generous, invested him as with the golden air of early autumn; but,
morally speaking, she retreated before them--facing him still--as she
had retreated in the other cases before a like encounter. "Oh don't say
that, please," she answered with an intensity that expressed the dread of
having, in this case too, to choose and decide. What made her dread
great was precisely the force which, as it would seem, ought to have
banished all dread--the sense of something within herself, deep down,

that she supposed to be inspired and trustful passion. It was there like a
large sum stored in a bank--which there was a terror in having to begin
to spend. If she touched it, it would all come out.
"I haven't the idea that it will matter much to you," said Osmond. "I've
too little to offer you. What I have--it's enough for me; but it's not
enough for you. I've neither fortune, nor fame, nor extrinsic advantages
of any kind. So I offer nothing. I only tell you because I think it can't
offend you, and some day or other it may give you pleasure. It gives me
pleasure, I assure you," he went on, standing there before her,
considerately inclined to her, turning his hat, which he had taken up,
slowly round with a movement which had all the decent tremor of
awkwardness and none of its oddity, and presenting to her his firm,
refined, slightly ravaged face. "It gives me no pain, because it's
perfectly simple. For me you'll always be the most important woman in
the world."
Isabel looked at herself in this character--looked intently, thinking she
filled it with a certain grace. But what she said was not an expression of
any such complacency. "You don't offend me; but you ought to
remember that, without being offended, one may be incommoded,
troubled." "Incommoded," she heard herself saying that, and it struck
her as a ridiculous word. But it was what stupidly came to her.
"I remember perfectly. Of course you're surprised and startled. But if
it's nothing but that, it will pass away. And it will perhaps leave
something that I may not be ashamed of."
"I don't know what it may leave. You see at all events that I'm not
overwhelmed," said Isabel with rather a pale smile. "I'm not too
troubled to think. And I think that I'm glad I leave Rome to-morrow."
"Of course I don't agree with you there."
"I don't at all KNOW you," she added abruptly; and then she coloured
as she heard herself saying what she had said almost a year before to
Lord Warburton.

"If you were not going away you'd know me better."
"I shall do that some other time."
"I hope so. I'm very easy to know."
"No, no," she emphatically answered--"there you're not sincere. You're
not easy to know; no one could be less so."
"Well," he laughed, "I said that because I know myself. It may be a
boast, but I do."
"Very likely; but you're very wise."
"So are you, Miss Archer!" Osmond exclaimed.
"I don't feel so just now. Still, I'm wise enough to think you had better
go. Good-night."
"God bless you!" said Gilbert Osmond, taking the hand which she
failed to surrender. After which he added: "If we meet again you'll find
me as you leave me. If we don't I shall be so all the same."
"Thank you very much. Good-bye."
There was something quietly firm about Isabel's visitor; he might go of
his own movement, but wouldn't be dismissed. "There's one thing more.
I haven't asked anything of you--not even a thought in the future; you
must do me that justice. But there's a little service I should like to ask. I
shall not return home for several days; Rome's delightful, and