hing to do
with her present enterprise; her journey was rather an expression of her
independence of the old world than of a sense of further obligations to
it. "It's nothing to come to Europe," she said to Isabel; "it doesn't
seem to me one needs so many reasons for that. It is something to stay
at home; this is much more important." It was not therefore with a sense
of doing anything very important that she treated herself to another
pilgrimage to Rome; she had seen the place before and carefully
inspected it; her present act was simply a sign of familiarity, of her
knowing all about it, of her having as good a right as any one else to
be there. This was all very well, and Henrietta was restless; she had a
perfect right to be restless too, if one came to that. But she had after
all a better reason for coming to Rome than that she cared for it so
little. Her friend easily recognised it, and with it the worth of the
other's fidelity. She had crossed the stormy ocean in midwinter because
she had guessed that Isabel was sad. Henrietta guessed a great deal, but
she had never guessed so happily as that. Isabel's satisfactions just
now were few, but even if they had been more numerous there would still
have been something of individual joy in her sense of being justified
in having always thought highly of Henrietta. She had made large
concessions with regard to her, and had yet insisted that, with all
abatements, she was very valuable. It was not her own triumph, however,
that she found good; it was simply the relief of confessing to this
confidant, the first person to whom she had owned it, that she was not
in the least at her ease. Henrietta had herself approached this point
with the smallest possible delay, and had accused her to her face of
being wretched. She was a woman, she was a sister; she was not Ralph,
nor Lord Warburton, nor Caspar Goodwood, and Isabel could speak.

"Yes, I'm wretched," she said very mildly. She hated to hear herself say
it; she tried to say it as judicially as possible.

"What does he do to you?" Henrietta asked, frowning as if she were
enquiring into the operations of a quack doctor.

"He does nothing. But he doesn't like me."

"He's very hard to please!" cried Miss Stackpole. "Why don't you leave
him?"

"I can't change that way," Isabel said.

"Why not, I should like to know? You won't confess that you've made a
mistake. You're too proud."

"I don't know whether I'm too proud. But I can