mind gave it neither light nor air;
Osmond's beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high
window and mock at her. Of course it had not been physical suffering;
for physical suffering there might have been a remedy. She could come
and go; she had her liberty; her husband was perfectly polite. He took
himself so seriously; it was something appalling. Under all his culture,
his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his
knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank
of flowers. She had taken him seriously, but she had not taken him so
seriously as that. How could she--especially when she had known him
better? She was to think of him as he thought of himself--as the first
gentleman in Europe. So it was that she had thought of him at first, and
that indeed was the reason she had married him. But when she began to
see what it implied she drew back; there was more in the bond than she
had meant to put her name to. It implied a sovereign contempt for every
one but some three or four very exalted people whom he envied, and for
everything in the world but half a dozen ideas of his own. That was very
well; she would have gone with him even there a long distance; for
he pointed out to her so much of the baseness and shabbiness of life,
opened her eyes so wide to the stupidity, the depravity, the ignorance
of mankind, that she had been properly impressed with the infinite
vulgarity of things and of the virtue of keeping one's self unspotted by
it. But this base, if noble world, it appeared, was after all what one
was to live for; one was to keep it forever in one's eye, in order
not to enlighten or convert or redeem it, but to extract from it some
recognition of one's own superiority. On the one hand it was despicable,
but on the other it afforded a standard. Osmond had talked to Isabel
about his renunciation, his indifference, the ease with which he
dispensed with the usual aids to success; and all this had seemed to
her admirable. She had thought it a grand indifference, an exquisite
independence. But indifference was really the last of his qualities;
she had never seen any one who thought so much of others. For herself,
avowedly, the world had always interested her and the study of her
fellow creatures been her constant passion. She would have been willing,
however, to renounce all her curiosities and sympathies for the sake of
a personal life, if the person concerned had on