Chapter 42 - Page 2

task; it was in fact a repulsive one. She
asked herself with dismay whether Lord Warburton were pretending
to be in love with Pansy in order to cultivate another
satisfaction and what might be called other chances. Of this
refinement of duplicity she presently acquitted him; she
preferred to believe him in perfect good faith. But if his
admiration for Pansy were a delusion this was scarcely better
than its being an affectation. Isabel wandered among these ugly
possibilities until she had completely lost her way; some of them,
as she suddenly encountered them, seemed ugly enough. Then she
broke out of the labyrinth, rubbing her eyes, and declared that
her imagination surely did her little honour and that her
husband's did him even less. Lord Warburton was as disinterested
as he need be, and she was no more to him than she need wish. She
would rest upon this till the contrary should be proved; proved
more effectually than by a cynical intimation of Osmond's.

Such a resolution, however, brought her this evening but little
peace, for her soul was haunted with terrors which crowded to the
foreground of thought as quickly as a place was made for them.
What had suddenly set them into livelier motion she hardly knew,
unless it were the strange impression she had received in the
afternoon of her husband's being in more direct communication with
Madame Merle than she suspected. That impression came back to her
from time to time, and now she wondered it had never come before.
Besides this, her short interview with Osmond half an hour ago was
a striking example of his faculty for making everything wither
that he touched, spoiling everything for her that he looked at. It
was very well to undertake to give him a proof of loyalty; the
real fact was that the knowledge of his expecting a thing raised a
presumption against it. It was as if he had had the evil eye; as
if his presence were a blight and his favour a misfortune. Was the
fault in himself, or only in the deep mistrust she had conceived
for him? This mistrust was now the clearest result of their short
married life; a gulf had opened between them over which they
looked at each other with eyes that were on either side a
declaration of the deception suffered. It was a strange
opposition, of the like of which she had never dreamed--an
opposition in which the vital principle of the one was a thing of
contempt to the other. It was not her fault--she had practised no
deception; she had only admired and believed. She had taken all
the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had
suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a
dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end. Instead of leading
to the high places of happiness, from