ured tapestries, that sense of darkness
and suffocation of which I have spoken took possession of her; she
seemed shut up with an odour of mould and decay. She had resisted of
course; at first very humorously, ironically, tenderly; then, as the
situation grew more serious, eagerly, passionately, pleadingly. She had
pleaded the cause of freedom, of doing as they chose, of not caring for
the aspect and denomination of their life--the cause of other instincts
and longings, of quite another ideal.

Then it was that her husband's personality, touched as it never had
been, stepped forth and stood erect. The things she had said were
answered only by his scorn, and she could see he was ineffably ashamed
of her. What did he think of her--that she was base, vulgar, ignoble?
He at least knew now that she had no traditions! It had not been in his
prevision of things that she should reveal such flatness; her sentiments
were worthy of a radical newspaper or a Unitarian preacher. The real
offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her
own at all. Her mind was to be his--attached to his own like a small
garden-plot to a deer-park. He would rake the soil gently and water the
flowers; he would weed the beds and gather an occasional nosegay.
It would be a pretty piece of property for a proprietor already
far-reaching. He didn't wish her to be stupid. On the contrary, it was
because she was clever that she had pleased him. But he expected her
intelligence to operate altogether in his favour, and so far from
desiring her mind to be a blank he had flattered himself that it would
be richly receptive. He had expected his wife to feel with him and for
him, to enter into his opinions, his ambitions, his preferences; and
Isabel was obliged to confess that this was no great insolence on the
part of a man so accomplished and a husband originally at least so
tender. But there were certain things she could never take in. To
begin with, they were hideously unclean. She was not a daughter of the
Puritans, but for all that she believed in such a thing as chastity and
even as decency. It would appear that Osmond was far from doing anything
of the sort; some of his traditions made her push back her skirts. Did
all women have lovers? Did they all lie and even the best have their
price? Were there only three or four that didn't deceive their husbands?
When Isabel heard such things she felt a greater scorn for them than for
the gossip of