en I fatigue myself it's for you. I've given you an interest. That's
a great gift."

"Do you call it an interest?" Osmond enquired with detachment.

"Certainly, since it helps you to pass your time."

"The time has never seemed longer to me than this winter."

"You've never looked better; you've never been so agreeable, so
brilliant."

"Damn my brilliancy!" he thoughtfully murmured. "How little, after all,
you know me!"

"If I don't know you I know nothing," smiled Madame Merle. "You've the
feeling of complete success."

"No, I shall not have that till I've made you stop judging me."

"I did that long ago. I speak from old knowledge. But you express
yourself more too."

Osmond just hung fire. "I wish you'd express yourself less!"

"You wish to condemn me to silence? Remember that I've never been a
chatterbox. At any rate there are three or four things I should like to
say to you first. Your wife doesn't know what to do with herself," she
went on with a change of tone.

"Pardon me; she knows perfectly. She has a line sharply drawn. She means
to carry out her ideas."

"Her ideas to-day must be remarkable."

"Certainly they are. She has more of them than ever."

"She was unable to show me any this morning," said Madame Merle. "She
seemed in a very simple, almost in a stupid, state of mind. She was
completely bewildered."

"You had better say at once that she was pathetic."

"Ah no, I don't want to encourage you too much."

He still had his head against the cushion behind him; the ankle of one
foot rested on the other knee. So he sat for a while. "I should like to
know what's the matter with you," he said at last.

"The matter--the matter--!" And here Madame Merle stopped. Then she went
on with a sudden outbreak of passion, a burst of summer thunder in a
clear sky: "The matter is that I would give my right hand to be able to
weep, and that I can't!"

"What good would it do you to weep?"

"It would make me feel as I felt before I knew you."

"If I've dried your tears, that's something. But I've seen you shed
them."

"Oh, I believe you'll make me cry still. I mean make me howl like a
wolf. I've a great hope, I've a great need, of that. I was vile this
morning; I was horrid," she said.

"If Isabel was in the stupid state of mind you mention she probably
didn't perceive it," Osmond answered.

"It was precisely my deviltry that stupefied her. I couldn't help it; I
was full of something bad. Perhap