ly been able to make her
believe it was a gain! This at least was her present conviction; and
the thing certainly would have been easier than to care for society as
Osmond cared for it.

He was unable to live without it, and she saw that he had never really
done so; he had looked at it out of his window even when he appeared
to be most detached from it. He had his ideal, just as she had tried to
have hers; only it was strange that people should seek for justice in
such different quarters. His ideal was a conception of high prosperity
and propriety, of the aristocratic life, which she now saw that he
deemed himself always, in essence at least, to have led. He had never
lapsed from it for an hour; he would never have recovered from the shame
of doing so. That again was very well; here too she would have agreed;
but they attached such different ideas, such different associations and
desires, to the same formulas. Her notion of the aristocratic life was
simply the union of great knowledge with great liberty; the knowledge
would give one a sense of duty and the liberty a sense of enjoyment. But
for Osmond it was altogether a thing of forms, a conscious, calculated
attitude. He was fond of the old, the consecrated, the transmitted;
so was she, but she pretended to do what she chose with it. He had an
immense esteem for tradition; he had told her once that the best thing
in the world was to have it, but that if one was so unfortunate as not
to have it one must immediately proceed to make it. She knew that he
meant by this that she hadn't it, but that he was better off; though
from what source he had derived his traditions she never learned. He
had a very large collection of them, however; that was very certain,
and after a little she began to see. The great thing was to act in
accordance with them; the great thing not only for him but for her.
Isabel had an undefined conviction that to serve for another person than
their proprietor traditions must be of a thoroughly superior kind; but
she nevertheless assented to this intimation that she too must march
to the stately music that floated down from unknown periods in her
husband's past; she who of old had been so free of step, so desultory,
so devious, so much the reverse of processional. There were certain
things they must do, a certain posture they must take, certain people
they must know and not know. When she saw this rigid system close about
her, draped though it was in pict