Palazzo Crescentini. The
discreet opposition offered to her marriage by her aunt and her cousin
made on the whole no great impression upon her; the moral of it was
simply that they disliked Gilbert Osmond. This dislike was not alarming
to Isabel; she scarcely even regretted it; for it served mainly to
throw into higher relief the fact, in every way so honourable, that she
married to please herself. One did other things to please other people;
one did this for a more personal satisfaction; and Isabel's satisfaction
was confirmed by her lover's admirable good conduct. Gilbert Osmond was
in love, and he had never deserved less than during these still, bright
days, each of them numbered, which preceded the fulfilment of his
hopes, the harsh criticism passed upon him by Ralph Touchett. The chief
impression produced on Isabel's spirit by this criticism was that the
passion of love separated its victim terribly from every one but the
loved object. She felt herself disjoined from every one she had ever
known before--from her two sisters, who wrote to express a dutiful hope
that she would be happy, and a surprise, somewhat more vague, at her
not having chosen a consort who was the hero of a richer accumulation of
anecdote; from Henrietta, who, she was sure, would come out, too late,
on 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, shallow 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 cover 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 single woman. His disappointment made
him say angry things about the man she had preferred even to him: Isabel
flattered 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 preferred 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 tradit