't publish my mistake. I
don't think that's decent. I'd much rather die."

"You won't think so always," said Henrietta.

"I don't know what great unhappiness might bring me to; but it seems to
me I shall always be ashamed. One must accept one's deeds. I married
him before all the world; I was perfectly free; it was impossible to do
anything more deliberate. One can't change that way," Isabel repeated.

"You HAVE changed, in spite of the impossibility. I hope you don't mean
to say you like him."

Isabel debated. "No, I don't like him. I can tell you, because I'm weary
of my secret. But that's enough; I can't announce it on the housetops."

Henrietta gave a laugh. "Don't you think you're rather too considerate?"

"It's not of him that I'm considerate--it's of myself!" Isabel answered.

It was not surprising Gilbert Osmond should not have taken comfort in
Miss Stackpole; his instinct had naturally set him in opposition to a
young lady capable of advising his wife to withdraw from the conjugal
roof. When she arrived in Rome he had said to Isabel that he hoped she
would leave her friend the interviewer alone; and Isabel had answered
that he at least had nothing to fear from her. She said to Henrietta
that as Osmond didn't like her she couldn't invite her to dine, but
they could easily see each other in other ways. Isabel received Miss
Stackpole freely in her own sitting-room, and took her repeatedly to
drive, face to face with Pansy, who, bending a little forward, on the
opposite seat of the carriage, gazed at the celebrated authoress with a
respectful attention which Henrietta occasionally found irritating. She
complained to Isabel that Miss Osmond had a little look as if she should
remember everything one said. "I don't want to be remembered that way,"
Miss Stackpole declared; "I consider that my conversation refers only
to the moment, like the morning papers. Your stepdaughter, as she sits
there, looks as if she kept all the back numbers and would bring
them out some day against me." She could not teach herself to think
favourably of Pansy, whose absence of initiative, of conversation, of
personal claims, seemed to her, in a girl of twenty, unnatural and even
uncanny. Isabel presently saw that Osmond would have liked her to urge a
little the cause of her friend, insist a little upon his receiving her,
so that he might appear to suffer for good manners' sake. Her immediate
acceptance of his objections put him too muc